The F RACTAL component model and its support in Java

This paper presents FRACTAL, 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 JULIA, 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 FRACTAL can be made very efficient.