Towards a Meta-Modelling Approach to Configurable Middleware

In our research we are studying how to combine modelling, metamodelling, and reflection to systematically generate middleware configurations that can be targeted at different application domains and deployment environments. Despite this generality our approach adopts a uniform set of concepts: components, components frameworks, and reflection. Components and component frameworks provide structure, and reflection provides dynamic (re)configuration and extensibility for run-time evolution and adaptation. In this paper we present meta-models that capture the generality inherent to our approach and form a basis for automatic generation of extensible “middleware families” that can be instantiated differently depending on the application domain, QoS, deployment environment and degree of dynamic reconfigurability required.