A Reflective Infrastructure for Coarse-Grained Strong Mobility and its Tool-Based Implementation

We argue that separation of concerns can be advantageously applied to the development of applications relying on coarse-grained strong mobility, i.e. distributed applications moving entities while these entities are executing. We present the design of an infrastructure for such mobile applications where the mobility concern is cleanly separated from other concerns. We present an overview of a prototype implementation — called RAM (Reflection for Adaptable Mobility) — of such an infrastructure for strong mobility in Java by means of computational reflection. This infrastructure permits the development of mobile applications by plugging a mobility concern implemented at the meta-level into a sequential base program, and enables the dynamic introduction of different migration policies. We show how such an infrastructure can be implemented based on program transformation techniques using appropriate existing tools. Invited presentation at the International Workshop on “Experiences with reflective systems”, Kyoto, Japan, 25 September 2001. (Held in conjunction with Reflection 2001, the “3rd International Conference on Metalevel Architectures and Separation of Crosscutting Concerns”.) Technical report no.: 01/7/INFO This work is part of the project “Reflection for Adaptable Mobility” (RAM) which has been partially funded by France Télécom, CTI no. 98-5.1069.