Reflection '96 Overview

Reflection is the name given to a design principle that allows a system to have a representation of itself in a manner that makes it easy to adapt the system to a changing environment. Reflective and meta-level techniques have now matured to the point where they are being used to address real-world problems in such areas as programming languages, operating systems, databases, and distributed computing (For an example and links to pages describing other systems using this approach, see the Open Implementation home page).

Reflection has been a widely researched design principle for the last few years. Results of this research have been presented at various journals, conferences and workshops. Reflection'96 is a conference that focused (as the title suggests, of course) on this design principle. The conference has papers that explore both the fundamental nature of this principle as well as applications and concrete system designs based on it.

The technical program of the conference has been organized so that people with little or no knowledge of reflection will not be lost. It begins with some tutorial papers that are meant as a gentle introduction to the concept. Apart from a range of excellent papers that present the state of the art, it also includes a panel which will discuss the design of reflective systems.

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