Reflection and Software Engineering

Walter Cazzola, Andrea Sosio, Francesco Tisato (auth.), Walter Cazzola, Robert J. Stroud, Francesco Tisato (eds.)3540677615, 9783540677611

This book presents the state of the art of research and development of computational reflection in the context of software engineering. Reflection has attracted considerable attention recently in software engineering, particularly from object-oriented researchers and professionals. The properties of transparency, separation of concerns, and extensibility supported by reflection have largely been accepted as useful in software development and design; reflective features have been included in successful software development technologies such as the Java language. The book offers revised versions of papers presented first at a workshop held during OOPSLA’99 together with especially solicited contributions. The papers are organized in topical sections on reflective and software engineering foundations, reflective software adaptability and evolution, reflective middleware, engineering Java-based reflective languages, and dynamic reconfiguration through reflection.

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Table of contents :
Shifting Up Reflection from the Implementation to the Analysis Level….Pages 1-20
Towards a True Reflective Modeling Scheme….Pages 21-38
Declarable Modifiers: A Proposal to Increase the Efficacy of Metaclasses….Pages 39-57
Managing Evolution Using Cooperative Designs and a Reflective Architecture….Pages 59-78
The Role of Reflective Middleware in Supporting the Engineering of Dynamic Applications….Pages 79-98
Active Network Service Management Based on Meta-level Architectures….Pages 99-116
OpenJava: A Class-Based Macro System for Java….Pages 117-133
OpenJIT Frontend System: An Implementation of the Reflective JIT Compiler Frontend….Pages 135-154
Kava – A Reflective Java Based on Bytecode Rewriting….Pages 155-167
Using Reflection to Support Dynamic Adaptation of System Software: A Case Study Driven Evaluation….Pages 169-188
On the Integration of Configuration and Meta-level Programming Approaches….Pages 189-208
Carp @ — A Reflection Based Tool for Observing Jini Services….Pages 209-227