That's a good question.  It seems that cargo should take care of that for you, but I guess I see why they don't do it since you would need to tell it about HTTP ports or JMX ports to query.

The easiest way I can think of is to write a simple JUnit (not JSFUnit) test.  In that test, ping your HTTP port to find out if JBoss is running.  Since HtmlUnit is already there, I would use that.  Let that run during the normal test phase and set a flag somewhere.  When you hit cargo in the integration-test phase it would look at the flag and know if JBoss is running or not.  I don't know the details of the implementation, but that's the best approach I can think of.

Stan