Reflecting on Adaptive Distributed Monitoring

Metaprogramming and computational reflection are two related concepts that allow a program to inspect and possibly modify itself while running. Although the concepts have been explored by researchers for some time, a form of metaprogramming, namely aspect-oriented programming, is now being used by some practitioners. This paper is an attempt to understand the limitations of different forms of computational reflection in concurrent and distributed computing. It specifically studies the use of aspect-oriented programming and reflective actor libraries, and their relation to full reflection. We choose distributed monitoring as the primary example application because its requirements nicely fit the abilities of the two systems as well as illustrate their limitations.