Definitely my farvourite from a user's point of view. Let the mule
server itself find the correct order for the agents.
No, there was a bug specifically loooong time ago, when a declared agent order wasn't observed. Briefly, Mule must follow the user-declared order of agents, and agents can't know about each other.
E.g. depending on the environment, an agent may or may not try to setup some servers (rmi registry), or use existing (created by a previous agent).
Moreover, agents may register child agents (see DefaultJmxSupportAgent), and further manipulate the list, like removing itself. There's some a bit crazy agent collection manipulations to ensure the declared order is not broken by such host agents.
As for the config, make them top-level independent nodes and let user specify the order. E.g. mx4j can't be a child/depend on jmx, as Mule could be running e.g. embedded and use server's resources.
Andrew
