With the rise of global networks as evidenced by the Internet, the World Wide Web and Intranets, a new computing environment is being rapidly established. The new environment creates an opportunity to combine several key technologies and produce an effective platform to deploy significant network distributed applications. These technologies have been developed over the last twenty years in the fields of dynamic programming, reflective object oriented systems and presentation based user interfaces. We propose to combine these crucial technologies as a series of practical tools to effectively exploit the evolving network computing arena. Franz Inc. leads in building and marketing the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS), a widely used Dynamic Object Language. Franz has teamed with Dynamic Object Language Labs, who specialize in applications that utilize dynamic programming and reflective systems. Franz and DOLL propose to develop a tool we call Smart Components, basing it on the technologies of dynamic programming, reflective object oriented systems and presentation based user interfaces. Central to our proposal is fitting well with newly emerging network computing architectures, such as Java and the Internet, and applying principles developed within the Lisp community over the last twenty years which manage the evolution of complex software. In Phase II we plan to commercialize infrastructure needed for Smart Components. This consists of a linkage between Java and CLOS, consisting of a CLOS representation of Java, including a tool to directly read in Java and a byte code compiler which can program Java VMs using code written in this CLOS representation. We plan to implement Smart Components itself in alpha form.
Keywords: DYNAMIC LANGUAGE, SEMANTIC USER INTERFACE, MOBILE CODE
