Significant progress has been made in the design and development of object-based distributed systems and, more recently, in component-based reflective middleware platforms-i.e. middleware platforms that, through reflection, can be flexibly configured, and runtime adapted/reconfigured-especially in terms of non-functional properties like quality of service (QoS). In this paper we consider how ideas and principles from such platforms can usefully be applied in a Grid context, specifically, an Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) context. To this end, we identify weaknesses in OGSA in the areas of generic service provision, scalability/performance engineering, and, especially, lack of support for QoS specification and realization, and suggest how these can be alleviated. We believe that such areas will become increasingly important as sophisticated e-Science applications start to exploit the potential of OGSA's service-based architecture. We also report on our current research on developing a binding-type framework, a resource management framework, and a set of performance optimizations for an ongoing OGSA implementation we are working on. Copyright (C) 2004 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.