:-)

The short answer is that JBoss has never finished
starting up, because of the hot-deployment.

But, you should be able to achieve what you want with
JBoss3.0 by polling the state on the
URlDeploymentScanner for 3=Started,
or in JBoss2 with the AutoDeployer.
You will need a piece of code that makes a
remote connection to JBoss's MBeanServer,
either using RMI or EJB.

Under the current rules, the relevant MBean has finished
when all initial services/deployments are complete, unless
they spawn threads to do other work, but even then
you should be ok.

I would anticipate that in future the startup will
move to multi-threaded, but by the time this happens,
your question will be irrelevant and any remote clients
will wait for services they require to come up or
find another clustered server that can process their
request.

Regards,
Adrian