Pluggable Reflection: Decoupling Meta-Interface and Implementation

David H. Lorenz, Northeastern University
John Vlissides, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Reflection remains a second-class citizen in current programming models, where it's assumed to be imperative and tightly bo und to its implementation. In contrast, most object-oriented APIs all ow interfaces to vary independently of their implementations. Components take this separation a step further by describing unforeseeable attr ibutes---the key to pluggable third-party components. This paper describes how reflection can benefit from a similar evolutionary path.

In Proceedings of the 25^th International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 3--13, Portland, Oregon May 3-10, 2003. ICSE 2003, IEEE Computer Society. To appear.

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paper.html (html)

icse2003.ps.gz (244k)

icse2003.pdf (575k)

The slides from the ICSE presentation: (424k)

Related papers:
Gilad Bracha and David Ungar: "Mirrors: Design Principles for Meta-level Facilities of Object-Oriented Programming Languages". In OOPSLA'04.

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@InProceedings{Lorenz:2003:DCO,
	Author = "David H. Lorenz and John Vlissides",
	Crossref = "ICSE:2003",
	Title = "Pluggable Reflection: {Decoupling} Meta-Interface and Implementation",
	URL = "http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/lorenz/papers/icse03/",
	Year = 2003,
	Pages = "3--13",
}
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