There are several papers and projects proposing alternatives to the standard Reflection API. The ones which are actually being implemented and are attempting to provide a much more powerful API usually end up having to resort to native code or, even worse, a custom (non-standard) JVM implementation. The latter is what is being done by the metaXa project and IBM's Jalapeno (a complete Java virtual machine for servers). The OpenJIT project is also developing a more powerful reflection API (which is almost all Java code with a few native methods) for their reflexive compiler.