Reflecting on aspect-oriented programming, metaprogramming, and adaptive distributed monitoring

Abstract

Metaprogramming and computational reflection are two related techniques that allow the programmer to change the semantics of a program in a modular fashion. Although the concepts have been explored by researchers for some time, a form of metaprogramming, namely aspect-oriented programming, is now being used by some practitioners. This paper is an attempt to understand the limitations of different forms of computational reflection in concurrent and distributed computing. It specifically studies the use of aspect-oriented programming and reflective actor libraries, and their relation to full reflection. We choose distributed monitoring as the primary example application because its requirements nicely fit the abilities of the two systems as well as illustrate their limitations. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.