Gossip protocols have been successfully applied in the last few years to address a wide range of functionalities. So far, however, very few software frameworks have been proposed to ease the development and deployment of these gossip protocols. To address this issue, this paper presents GossipKit, an event-driven framework that provides a generic and extensible architecture for the development of (re)configurable gossiporiented middleware. GossipKit is based on a generic interaction model for gossip protocols and relies on a fine-grained event mechanism to facilitate configuration and reconfiguration and to promote code reuse. Key words: gossip protocol, component framework, middleware, flexibility, event-driven architecture