Toward Integration A Time for Reflection

It’s hard to believe that it’s already 2005. Tradi-tionally, a new year’s arrival brings reflectionson the previous year. Such reflection can often result in positive changes and improvements in our lives. Software reflection, a technique or approach that makes software self-aware, is simi-lar to human reflection, although not as subjective or complicated. Proper use of software reflection can produce flexible, adaptable applications. In a sense, reflective applications, like reflective peo-ple, are capable of dynamic self-improvement. Because integration requires flexibility and adaptation, reflection is growing in popularity for software, such as Web services, that glues appli-cations together. Understanding reflection basics and how to apply them to your own applications can ease integration nightmares. Much has been written about reflective techniques, so I won’t try to cover the topic in its entirety here. Instead, I’ll focus on a problem that reflection can help solve: dynamic invocation as an approach for working across disparate type systems. (For more infor-mation about reflection in general, visit the reflective middleware section of IEEE Distributed Systems Online