Well, the separate-object-proxy approach can prevent people from cheating; I guess the real question here is whether the NodeSPI is intended for use by application code at all, or just by plugin/extension authors. My leaning is towards the latter, which means that if something is isDataLoaded() is needed by application code, then it should be promoted to the Node interface. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4090143#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...