A reflective model for mobile software objects

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