Meta-Object Manager: A Framework for Customizable Meta-Object Support
for Smalltalk-80
Marcelo R. Campo
Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Bs. As., Argentina
Roberto Tom Price
UFRGS
Meta-object managers represent a new mechanism to organize and control
meta- objects, specially designed to satisfy the requirements of tools
for debugging, testing, tuning , visualization, etc. A reflection
manager encapsulates a specific strategy to organize and activate
meta-objects, allowing the implementation of complex management
mechanisms, as for example, multiple meta-object association with
priorities of activation. The concept of meta-object managers
represents the foundation of MOM, a Smalltalk-80 framework for building
reflective-architectures, which have been successfully used to build
Luthier, a visual tool for understanding object-oriented frameworks,
and to extend the Smalltalk language for agent-oriented programming
through a two-level reflective architecture, with deliberative and
reactive intelligent capabilities.
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