A metaobject protocol for fault-tolerant CORBA applications

Abstract

The use of metalevel architectures for the implementation of fault-tolerant systems is today very appealing. Nevertheless, all such fault-tolerant systems have used a general-purpose metaobject protocol (MOP) or are based on restricted reflective features of some object-oriented language. According to our past experience, we define in this paper a suitable metaobject protocol, called FT-MOP for building fault-tolerant systems. We explain how to realize a specialized runtime MOP using compile-time reflection. This MOP is CORBA compliant: it enables the execution and the state evolution of CORBA objects to be controlled and enables the fault tolerance metalevel to be developed as CORBA software.