Integrating meta-information management and reflection in middleware

The representation and management of meta-information is an important issue in reflective architectures. In the case of complex base-level systems, such as middleware platforms, this issue becomes even more crucial, given the large number of entities of different kinds that must be dealt with and especially, given the fact that such entities are normally distributed, which makes it difficult to maintain their consistency. The authors present an approach to represent and maintain middleware meta-information and show how it is integrated with their reflective architecture for middleware, which is based on the idea of multi-model reflection. The result is a principled way to control the use and evolution of meta-information in the platform, also offering a means to harness the power of reflection. The paper also outlines an implementation of the approach, as well as the major implications of its use.