Add to ORKGRecent advances in hardware and networking have fueled the interest in distributed computing in general and in metacomputing frameworks in particular. Harness is an experimental metacomputing system based upon the principle of dynamic reconfigurability both in terms of the computers and networks that comprise the virtual machine, and in the services offered by the virtual machine itself. In this paper we describe how the capability to reconfigure the virtual machine plugging services on demand can be exploited to design dynamically reconfigurable applications based on behavioral objects and cooperating layered services