The F<scp>RACTAL</scp> component model and its support in Java

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents F RACTAL , a hierarchical and reflective component model with sharing. Components in this model can be endowed with arbitrary reflective capabilities, from plain black‐box objects to components that allow a fine‐grained manipulation of their internal structure. The paper describes J ULIA , a Java implementation of the model, a small but efficient runtime framework, which relies on a combination of interceptors and mixins for the programming of reflective features of components. The paper presents a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of this implementation, showing that component‐based programming in F RACTAL can be made very efficient. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.