Today s businesses prefer to buy applications than to build them. Metadata-driven application and business model integration can play a major role in allowing these systems to evolve smoothly. A system with an Adaptive Object-model has an explicit object model that is itself built out of objects. If you change the object model, the system changes its behavior. For example, a lot of workflow systems have an Adaptive Object-model.
Objects have states and respond to events by changing state.
Business rules can be stored in an Adaptive Object model. This makes it easy for the way a company does their business to evolve. Researchers working with reflection and meta-level architectures have been looking at how to make systems highly configurable for quite some. We hope to encourage such researchers to compare notes with practitioners who have been building highly configurable systems in industry. Indeed, Smalltalk s rich reflective facilities have helped to make Smalltalk fertile ground in which some of the earliest and best examples of such systems have germinated and flourished.