The role of open implementation and reflection in supporting mobile applications

Reflection has emerged as an important technique, most notably in the field of programming languages. The benefits of this approach are that implementations can be more open in terms of inspection and adaptation. This paper argues that reflection can also be applied to the design of next generation middleware platforms, and that the resultant openness can help in areas such as mobile applications. The paper also presents a reflective middleware architecture, featuring a per-object metaspace, the use of meta-models to structure meta-space, and the use of object graphs for composite components.