Brian, What would the use case of getState() be? Is this for use by the MC and other mechanisms to manage the cache via JMX? I guess what I'm asking is, where does this need to reside? In the Cache, CacheSPI or JMX interface? And also, what statii are we looking for? I have a simple boolean "started" at the moment, but this could change to an enum of {CREATED, STARTED, STOPPED, DESTROYED} ... Cheers, -- Manik Surtani Lead, JBoss Cache JBoss, a division of Red Hat Email: manik(a)jboss.org Telephone: +44 7786 702 706 MSN: manik(a)surtani.org Yahoo/AIM/Skype: maniksurtani