Augmenting Reflective Middleware With an Aspect Orientation Support Layer

Reflective middleware provides an effective way to support adaptation in distributed systems. However, as distributed systems become increasingly complex, certain drawbacks of the reflective middleware approach are becoming evident. In particular, reflective APIs are found to impose a steep learning curve, and to place too much expressive power in the hands of developers. Recently, researchers in the field of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) have argued that 'Dynamic aspects' show promise in alleviating these drawbacks. In this paper, the authors report on work that attempts to combine the reflective middleware and AOP approaches. They build an AOP support layer on top of an underlying reflective middleware substrate in such a way that it can be dynamically deployed/undeployed where and when required, and imposes no overhead when it is not used.