Quality of service and object-oriented middleware - multiple concerns and their separation

Quality of service (QoS) is an important requirement of today's distribution infrastructures. The popularity of object-oriented middleware makes QoS provision in those infrastructures desirable. The system-dependent nature of QoS necessitates a clear separation of concerns and insulation from the application objects. In this paper, QoS integration is investigated from two viewpoints. First, based on the aspect-oriented programming, the integration of QoS mechanisms into the application objects is presented, and second, the hierarchical structure of QoS mechanisms is addressed in a reflection-based approach.