Experiments with reective middleware

Abstract

Middleware platforms have emerged as an effective answer to the requirements of open distributed processing. However, in our opinion, a new engineering approach based on configurability and openess of plat- form implementations is essential to meet the needs of applications areas such as multimedia, groupware and mobile computing. This paper out- lines our architecture for configurable and open middleware platforms, along with a first prototype. The architecture is based on the concept of reection, the ability for a program to access, reason about and alter its own implementation in a principled way, according to a well-defined Meta-Object Protocol (MOP) [1].