Partial behavioral reflection: spatial and temporal selection of reification

ABSTRACT

Behavioral reflection is a powerful approach for adapting the behavior of running applications. In this paper we present and motivate partial behavioral reflection, an approach to more efficient and flexible behavioral reflection. We expose the spatial and temporal dimensions of such reflection, and propose a model of partial behavioral reflection based on the notion of hooksets. In the context of Java, we describe a reflective architecture offering appropriate interfaces for static and dynamic configuration of partial behavioral reflection at various levels, as well as Reflex, an open reflective extension for Java implementing this architecture. Reflex is the first extension that fully supports partial behavioral reflection in a portable manner, and that seamlessly integrates load-time and runtime behavioral reflection. The paper shows preliminary benchmarks and examples supporting the approach. The examples, dealing with the observer pattern and asynchronous communication via transparent futures, also show the interest of partial behavioral reflection as a tool for open dynamic Aspect-Oriented Programming.

REFERENCES

• 1: The ACM SIGPLAN/SIGSOFT Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering, October 2002
• 2: L. Bergmans. The composition filters object model. In Proceedings of the RICOT symposium on Enabling Objects for Industry, June 1994.
• 3: Gordon S. Blair , Geoff Coulson , Lynne Blair , Mike Clarke , Fabio Costa , Hector Duran , Nikos Parlavantzas , Katia Saikoski , Anders Andersen, A Principled Approach to Supporting Adaptation in Distributed Mobile Environments, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Software Engineering for Parallel and Distributed Systems, p.3, June 10-11, 2000
• 4: Johan Brichau , Kim Mens , Kris De Volder, Building Composable Aspect-Specific Languages with Logic Metaprogramming, The ACM SIGPLAN/SIGSOFT Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering, p.110-127, October 06-08, 2002
• 5: Licia Capra , Wolfgang Emmerich , Cecilia Mascolo, Reflective Middleware Solutions for Context-Aware Applications, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Metalevel Architectures and Separation of Crosscutting Concerns, p.126-133, September 25-28, 2001
• 6: D. Caromel, W. Klauser, and J. Vayssière. Towards seamless computing and metacomputing in Java. Concurrency Practice and Experience, 10(11-13):1043--1061, Sept. 1998.
• 7: Denis Caromel , Julien Vayssière, Reflections on MOPs, Components, and Java Security, Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, p.256-274, June 18-22, 2001
• 8: K. Cheverst, C. Efstratiou, N. Davies, and A. Friday. Architectural ideas for the support of adaptive context-aware applications. In Workshop on Infrastructure for Smart Devices - How to Make Ubiquity an Actuality, Bristol, UK, Sept. 2000.
• 9: Shigeru Chiba, A metaobject protocol for C++, Proceedings of the tenth annual conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, p.285-299, October 15-19, 1995, Austin, Texas, United States
• 10: Shigeru Chiba, Load-Time Structural Reflection in Java, Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, p.313-336, June 12-16, 2000
• 11: Shigeru Chiba , Takashi Masuda, Designing an Extensible Distributed Language with a Meta-Level Architecture, Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, p.482-501, July 26-30, 1993
• 12: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Meta-Level Architectures and Reflection, July 1999
• 13: M. Dahm. Byte code engineering. In C. Cap, editor, Proceedings of JIT'99, Berlin, pages 267--277, 1999.
• 14: Pierre-Charles David , Thomas Ledoux, An Infrastructure for Adaptable Middleware, On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems, 2002 - DOA/CoopIS/ODBASE 2002 Confederated International Conferences DOA, CoopIS and ODBASE 2002, p.773-790, October 30-November 01, 2002
• 15: Kris De Volder , Theo D'Hondt, Aspect-Orientated Logic Meta Programming, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Meta-Level Architectures and Reflection, p.250-272, July 19-21, 1999
• 16: Edsger W. Dijkstra, The structure of the “THE”-multiprogramming system, Communications of the ACM, v.11 n.5, p.341-346, May 1968 [doi>10.1145/363095.363143]
• 17: Klaus R. Dittrich , Stella Gatziu , Andreas Geppert, The Active Database Management System Manifesto: A Rulebase of ADBMS Features, Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Rules in Database Systems, p.3-20, September 25-27, 1995
• 18: Rémi Douence , Pascal Fradet , Mario Südholt, A Framework for the Detection and Resolution of Aspect Interactions, The ACM SIGPLAN/SIGSOFT Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering, p.173-188, October 06-08, 2002
• 19: Rémi Douence , Olivier Motelet , Mario Südholt, A Formal Definition of Crosscuts, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Metalevel Architectures and Separation of Crosscutting Concerns, p.170-186, September 25-28, 2001
• 20: S. Ducasse. Evaluating message passing control techniques in Smalltalk. Journal of Object-Oriented Programming, June:39--50, 1999.
• 21: Tzilla Elrad , Robert E. Filman , Atef Bader, Aspect-oriented programming: Introduction, Communications of the ACM, v.44 n.10, p.29-32, Oct. 2001 [doi>10.1145/383845.383853]
• 22: J. Fabre , V. Nicomette , Zhixue Wu, Implementing Fault-Tolerant Applications Using Reflective Object-Oriented Programming, Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing, p.489, June 27-30, 1995
• 23: B. Foote , R. E. Johnson, Reflective facilities in Smalltalk-80, Conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications, p.327-335, October 02-06, 1989, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
• 24: Erich Gamma , Richard Helm , Ralph Johnson , John Vlissides, Design patterns: elements of reusable object-oriented software, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1995
• 25: Michael Golm , Jürgen Kleinöder, Jumping to the Meta Level: Behavioral Reflection Can Be Fast and Flexible, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Meta-Level Architectures and Reflection, p.22-39, July 19-21, 1999
• 26: B. Gowing and V. Cahill. Meta-object protocols for C++: The Iguana approach. In Kiczales {30}, pages 137--152.
• 27: Robert H. Halstead, Jr., MULTILISP: a language for concurrent symbolic computation, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.7 n.4, p.501-538, Oct. 1985 [doi>10.1145/4472.4478]
• 28: Jan Hannemann , Gregor Kiczales, Design pattern implementation in Java and aspectJ, Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, November 04-08, 2002, Seattle, Washington, USA
• 29: Mamdouh H. Ibrahim, Reflection and metalevel architectures in object-oriented programming (workshop session), Proceedings of the European conference on Object-oriented programming addendum : systems, languages, and applications: systems, languages, and applications, p.73-80, October 1990, Ottawa, Canada [doi>10.1145/319016.319050]
• 30: G. Kiczales, editor. Reflection'96, San Francisco, CA, USA, Apr. 1996.
• 31: G. Kiczales. The future of reflection. Invited talk at the Third International Conference on Metalevel Architectures and Advanced Separation of Concerns (Reflection 2001), Sept. 2001.
• 32: Gregor Kiczales , Jim Des Rivieres, The Art of the Metaobject Protocol, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991
• 33: Gregor Kiczales , Erik Hilsdale , Jim Hugunin , Mik Kersten , Jeffrey Palm , William G. Griswold, An Overview of AspectJ, Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, p.327-353, June 18-22, 2001
• 34: G. Kiczales, J. Lamping, A. Mendhekar, C. Maeda, C. Lopes, J.-M. Loingtier, and J. Irwin. Aspect-oriented programming. In M. Aksit and S. Matsuoka, editors, Proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP'97), volume 1241 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 220--242, Jyväskylä, Finland, June 1997. Springer-Verlag.
• 35: Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, June 2001
• 36: Thomas Ledoux, OpenCorba: A Reflektive Open Broker, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Meta-Level Architectures and Reflection, p.197-214, July 19-21, 1999
• 37: T. Ledoux and M. N. Bouraqadi-Sadani. Adaptability in Mobile Agent Systems using Reflection. RM'2000, Workshop on Reflective Middleware, Apr. 2000.
• 38: Sheng Liang , Gilad Bracha, Dynamic class loading in the Java virtual machine, Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, p.36-44, October 18-22, 1998, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• 39: P. Maes. Computional reflection. PhD thesis, Artificial intelligence laboratory, Vrije Universiteit, Brussels, Belgium, 1987.
• 40: Pattie Maes , D. Nardi, Meta-Level Architectures and Reflection, Elsevier Science Inc., New York, NY, 1988
• 41: H. Masuhara, S. Matsuoka, and A. Yonezawa. An object-oriented concurrent reflective language for dynamic resource management in highly parallel computing. In IPSJ SIG Notes, volume 94-PRG-18, 1994.
• 42: Jeff McAffer, Meta-level Programming with CodA, Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, p.190-214, August 07-11, 1995
• 43: J. McAffer. Engineering the meta-level. In Kiczales {30}, pages 39--61.
• 44: Philippe Mulet , Jacques Malenfant , Pierre Cointe, Towards a methodology for explicit composition of metaobjects, Proceedings of the tenth annual conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, p.316-330, October 15-19, 1995, Austin, Texas, United States
• 45: A. Oliva and L. E. Buzato. The design and implementation of Guaraná. In Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies & Systems (COOTS'99), pages 203--216, San Diego, CA, USA, May 1999.
• 46: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA'95), Austin, Texas, USA, Oct. 1995. ACM Press.
• 47: Harold Ossher , Petri Tarr, Hyper/J: multi-dimensional separation of concerns for Java, Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering, p.821-822, May 12-19, 2001, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• 48: D. L. Parnas, On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules, Communications of the ACM, v.15 n.12, p.1053-1058, Dec. 1972 [doi>10.1145/361598.361623]
• 49: Renaud Pawlak , Lionel Seinturier , Laurence Duchien , Gerard Florin, JAC: A Flexible Solution for Aspect-Oriented Programming in Java, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Metalevel Architectures and Separation of Crosscutting Concerns, p.1-24, September 25-28, 2001
• 50: Andrei Popovici , Gustavo Alonso , Thomas Gross, Just-in-time aspects: efficient dynamic weaving for Java, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Aspect-oriented software development, p.100-109, March 17-21, 2003, Boston, Massachusetts [doi>10.1145/643603.643614]
• 51: B. Redmond and V. Cahill. Iguana/J: Towards a dynamic and efficient reflective architecture for Java. ECOOP 2000 Workshop on Reflection and Metalevel Architectures, June 2000.
• 52: Barry Redmond , Vinny Cahill, Supporting Unanticipated Dynamic Adaptation of Application Behaviour, Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, p.205-230, June 10-14, 2002
• 53: F. Rivard. Smalltalk: a reflective language. In Kiczales {30}, pages 21--38.
• 54: F. Rivard. Évolution du comportement des objets dans les langages à classes réflexifs. PhD thesis, Université de Nantes, École des Mines de Nantes, June 1997. In French.
• 55: Brian Cantwell Smith, Reflection and semantics in LISP, Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.23-35, January 15-18, 1984, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States [doi>10.1145/800017.800513]
• 56: Éric Tanter , Noury M. N. Bouraqadi-Saâdani , Jacques Noyé, Reflex - Towards an Open Reflective Extension of Java, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Metalevel Architectures and Separation of Crosscutting Concerns, p.25-43, September 25-28, 2001
• 57: E. Tanter and J. Piquer. Managing references upon object migration: Applying separation of concerns. In Proceedings of the XXI International Conference of the Chilean Computer Science Society (SCCC 2001), pages 264--272, Punta Arenas, Chile, Nov. 2001. IEEE Computer Society.
• 58: Éric Tanter , Marc Ségura-Devillechaise , Jacques Noyé , José M. Piquer, Altering Java Semantics via Bytecode Manipulation, The ACM SIGPLAN/SIGSOFT Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering, p.283-298, October 06-08, 2002
• 59: E. Tanter, M. Vernaillen, and J. Piquer. Towards transparent adaptation of migration policies. In 8th ECOOP Workshop on Mobile Object Systems (EWMOS 2002), Málaga, Spain, June 2002.
• 60: Ian Welch , Robert J. Stroud, From Dalang to Kava - The Evolution of a Reflective Java Extension, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Meta-Level Architectures and Reflection, p.2-21, July 19-21, 1999
• 61: Z. Wu. Reflective Java and a reflective component-based transaction architecture. In J.-C. Fabre and S. Chiba, editors, Proceedings of the ACM OOPSLA'98 Workshop on Reflective Programming in Java and C++, Oct. 1998.
• 62: R. Wuyts. A Logic Meta-Programming Approach to Support the Co-Evolution of Object-Oriented Design and Implementation. PhD thesis, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2001.
• 63: A. Yonezawa and S. Matsuoka, editors. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Metalevel Architectures and Advanced Separation of Concerns, volume 2192 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Kyoto, Japan, Sept. 2001. Springer-Verlag.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.5 Object-oriented Programming

General Terms:
Experimentation, Languages

Keywords:
aspect-oriented programming, open systems, reflection