Anders Andersen

Abstract

Anders Andersen, Gordon Blair, Geoff Coulson, Frank Eliassen, A reflective component-based middleware in Python, The Eighth International Python Conference - Short Talk, USA, January 2000, Foretec Seminars, Arlington, Virginia, 2000.

The role of middleware is to present a unified programming model to application writers and mask out the problems of heterogeneity and distribution. However, new application types need support for multimedia, real-time and mobility. This support should be configurable to satisfy the requirements from a wide variety of applications. But this is not enough. Mobility and continuous media requires the possibility to inspect and adapt the support offered at run-time. This can be done by adopting an open engineering approach for the design of the middleware platform. Reflection provides a principled (as opposed to ad hoc) means of achieving open engineering. The Open-ORB Python Prototype (OOPP) presented in this paper implements a reflective middleware with the possibility to inspect, adapt and extend the components of the system to satisfy the requirements of a given application.