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 program-ming models, where it's assumed to be imperative and tightly bound to its implementation. In contrast, most object-oriented APIs allow interfaces to vary independently of their implementations. Components take this separation a step further by describing unforeseeable attributes-the key to pluggable third-party components. This paper describes how reflection can benefit from a similar evolutionary path.
Technical Report NU-CCS-02-10,
College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University, September 2002.
NU-CCS-02-10.ps.gz (submitted to ICSE '03)
@TechReport{Lorenz:2002:PRD,
Title = "Pluggable Reflection: Decoupling Meta-Interface and Implementation",
Author = "David~H. Lorenz and John Vlissides",
Institution = "College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University",
Address = "Boston, MA 02115",
Month = sep,
Number = "{NU-CCS-02-10}",
Year = 2002,
}