Reflection is a promising approach towards self adaptive and self 
healing systems, also being of great value for the dynamic discovery of 
services. The deployment of reflection mechanisms in distributed systems 
middleware is based on the same overall argument which applies to usual 
distribution services: middleware allows such services (including reflection!) 
to be transparently accessed, regardless of the heterogeneity of their 
implementations. In addition, and importantly, the benefits of reflection 
(e.g., dynamic adaptation) can be applied to the design and implementation of 
the middleware platform itself. In this talk I will briefly discuss the 
fundamental principles of reflective middleware, followed by their 
instantiation in the Open ORB architecture. This part of the talk will focus on 
high level architectural issues, as well as on the several prototypes of the 
architecture. The second part will focus on the issue of combining meta-
information management with reflection in middleware, exploring some of its 
immediate benefits, along with a few promising ways to exploit this combination 
to improve the flexibility of middleware.