[Choose-news] PhD Defense: Sub-method Structural and Behavioral Reflection

[Marcus Denker]

Hello,

on Monday 26th of May at 11:00 I will defend my PhD.
The defense will take place in room 003 in the IWI building,  
Engehaldenstrasse 8, 3012 Bern.

After the defense, there will be an apero in the Cafeteria of the  
building S14 (Schuetzenmattstrasse 14).

Everybody is invited to the defense and to the apero.

Marcus Denker
Software Composition Group
Universitaet Bern

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TITLE: Sub-method Structural and Behavioral Reflection

ABSTRACT:
Computational reflection is a fundamental mechanism in object oriented  
languages.
Reflection has proved useful in many contexts, such as in the design  
of development environments,
language extension, and the dynamic, unanticipated adaptation of  
running systems.

We identify three problems with the current approach to reflection in  
object oriented languages:
partial behavioral reflection needs to be anticipated, structural  
reflection is limited to
the granularity of a method, and behavioral reflection cannot be  
applied to the whole system.

To address these problems, we extend structural reflection to cover  
sub-method elements
and present how sub-method structural reflection supports  
unanticipated partial behavioral reflection.
We add the concept of context to represent meta-level execution and  
show how this
allows behavioral reflection to be applied even to system classes.

We describe an implementation in Smalltalk. Benchmarks validate the  
practicability of our approach.
In addition, we present an experimental evaluation in which we show  
how the system is used for dynamic
analysis. We realize dynamic feature analysis by annotating the sub- 
method structure of the system
directly to denote features instead of recording full execution traces.

	Marcus
--
Marcus Denker  --  denker at iam.unibe.ch
http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~denker