Object location control using meta-level programming.

In distributed environments, location control of objects among hosts is a crucial concern. This paper proposes a new mechanism of object location control using meta-level programming which provides the following advantages to programmers. First, the description of location control can be separated from the application program by exploiting the meta-level architecture. This separation makes it easy for programmers to understand application programs and change location control policies. Second, it is possible for programmers to control object location using runtime information provided at the meta-level such as the number of remote messages. This information enables programmers to control object location more flexibly than in traditional distributed languages. The mechanism proposed in this paper has been implemented on an AL-1/D distributed reflective programming system. We show that our mechanism of location control using meta-level programming provides reasonable performance for a distributed application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]