Sorry for the slow response, been moving house and have had limited connectivity. Adrian, thanks for the suggestion re: a cache-specific schema, that would certainly work very well. Regarding exposing lifecycle and self-configuration, I don't think we can mandate that client code use an IOC framework, and I think we must assume that they don't use one. That still should not prevent me from using IOC internally within JBoss Cache. Regarding a separate kernel per cache instance, I may be wrong here, but isn't this necessary to prevent namespace collissions? It is a perfectly valid usecase to have 2 cache instances in the same VM, with different configurations. Wouldn't the MC register bean instances under set names, and wouldn't these overwrite if the 2 cache instances share the same kernel instance? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4077032#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...