The Glasshouse - A Reflective Container for Mobile Code

Mobile code has become mainstream, Java’s applets provide a familiar example. Other examples, where the code may be loaded from a local store but may have been provided by a third party, are Enterprise Java Beans [1] and Microsoft’s COM [2]. Here, components execute within a container that provides services to the component. This container and component programming model is very similar to mobile code architectures where mobile code is executed within some form of execution platform. In this position paper, I describe how the component and container model is related to behavioural reflection and outline a proposal to build a reflective container for components called the Glasshouse that allows the use of intrusion-tolerant services, and supports some intrusion-tolerance for components.