Reflection 2001 - The Third International Conference on Metalevel Architectures and Separation of Crosscutting Concerns - Kyoto, Japan, September 25-28, 2001

KEYNOTE TALK

9/26 (Wed) 09:10-10:30

Reflection, MOPs, AOP and back again for more?

Gregor Kiczales, NSERC, Xerox, Sierra Systems Software Design Chair and Professor, University of British Columbia

In this talk I will address two main themes. First, the relation between Reflection, metaobject protocols (MOPs) and aspect-oriented programming. I will argue that ten years ago we made significant errors in the development of MOPs, and those errors both made MOPs work and took us off the reflection model proposed by Smith. I will use this to try and make a distinction between AOP and reflection.

The second theme will be to ask whether we might find the seeds of other ideas like AOP in reflection if we went back to some of the first principles and tried to take them in a different direction.


Gregor Kiczales is Professor of Computer Science and the NSERC, Xerox Canada, Sierra Systems Chair of Software Design at the University of British Columbia.

His research is directed at enabling programmers to write programs that, as much as possible, look like their design. He has worked on a variety of techniques to achieve this, including object-oriented programming, metaobject protocols, open implementation, and most recently aspect-oriented programming. He is author, with Danny Bobrow and Jim des Rivieres of "The Art of the Metaobject Protocol".

He is also a Principal Scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he leads the group that has developed AspectJ.