A reflective model for mobile software objects

Abstract

Mobile software objects are autonomous computational entities that travel in large-scale and widely-distributed heterogeneous systems, and whose functionality can be attached to diverse computing environments. An object model that supports mobile objects should have special characteristics such as mutability of object's structure and semantics to facilitate adjustment to different environments, self-containment of objects to allow their migration as autonomous units, and extensive support for security. We discuss the requirements and design guidelines of such a model, and present MROM, a reflective model based on these guidelines. We also discuss MROM's implementation and present a component interoperability framework that was built on top of it, as an example application of the model.