A Flexible Approach To Interactive Runtime Inspection

Behavioral reflection is well-known approach enabling exhaustive querying of program state (introspection) as well as controlling its execution (intercession). It is hence an adequate foundation for runtime inspection. Partial behavioral reflection aims at making behavioral reflection more applicable by providing high levels of selectivity and configurability. We first outline the main features of partial behavioral reflection and of Reflex---our portable Java implementation. We then sketch how we plan to apply such an approach to provide an interactive environment for runtime inspection, which, in particular, could be used to assist in reflective and aspect-oriented programming