Beyond flexibility and reflection: The virtual virtual machine approach

Abstract

With todays wide acceptance of distributed computing, a rapidly growing number of application domains are emerging, leading to a growing number of ad-hoc solutions, rigid and poorly interoperable. Our response to this challenge is a platform for building flexible and interoperable execution environments (including language and system aspects) called the Virtual Virtual Machine. This paper presents our approach, the first two realisations and their applications to active networks and flexible web caching.