Channel Reification: a Reflective Approach to Fault Tolerant Software Development

Reflective systems can be used to ease the implementation of fault tolerance mechanisms in distributed applications as show in [Anc95, Fab94]. In this paper we introduce a new model for reflective computations, and we show how it can be used for building up fault tolerant applications. Keyword: Object-Orientation, Reflection and Fault Tolerance. 1 Introduction and Background 1.1 Fault Tolerance Software mechanisms used to support fault tolerant applications include checkpointing facilities and replicated servers, for a survey see [Anc90], such fault tolerant behaviors can be implemented either by error processing protocols in the underlying runtime systems, or using pre-defined library functions and primitives, or using object-oriented methodologies, so making nonfunctional 1 characteristics inheritable.