Towards a Reflective Transactional Middleware Platform for Advanced Applications

Transactional middleware platforms must accommodate an increasingly diverse range of requirements from both the applications and the underlying systems. It is clear that advanced applications have characteristics and requirements that vary a lot, and that transactional middleware must be able to support the potential variety in transaction execution requirements. We describe a configurable and re-configurable reflective middleware platform that meets the needs of applications by supporting concurrently executing transaction services in a consistent way. The platform exposes the ability to deploy and manage transaction services according to the needs of the applications. The ability to perform these tasks is provided through reflection. A described meta-obejct protocol represents the reflective features. The platform is built upon the concepts of component frameworks and reflection as proposed in the OpenORB project.