The role of reflective middleware in supporting the engineering of dynamicapplications

The increasing complexity of building distributed applications has position ed middleware as a critical part of complex systems. However, current middl eware standards do not address properly the highly dynamic and diverse set of requirements posed by important classes of applications, such as those i nvolving multimedia and mobility. It is clear that middleware platforms nee d to be more flexible and adaptable and we believe that an open engineering approach is an essential requirement. More specifically, we propose the us e of object oriented reflection based on a multi-model reflection framework as a principled way to achieve such openness. This leads to middleware tha t is flexible, adaptable and extensible, and, in consequence, capable of su pporting applications with dynamic requirements.