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

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 ------------------------------------- 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(a)iam.unibe.ch http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~denker