Class 17: UML

Held:

Preliminaries

Related Pages

• Eboard 17 (Source)

Updates

News / Etc.

Upcoming work

• For Friday

Good things to do

• CS Extras, Thursday at 4:15 pm, Summer Code Camps

The UML

• The UML == The Unified Modeling Language
• A visual notation for representing key issues in the design of an object-oriented program.
• Observation: We like to communicate things visually. But for a visual notation to work well, we have to agree upon what the symbols mean.
• Can be used prospectively or retrospectively
• Three traditional ways to think about the UML
  • We use the UML to sketch out classes and their relationships while thinking about design.
  • We use the UML to blueprint most of the details of a system.
  • We use the UML as a programming language to implement a system.
• Developed collaboratively by many of the big names in OOP in the early ages of the adoption of OOA&D by industry.
• We’ll focus mostly on it as a tool for sketching.
• That is, we’ll use the UML to communicate important things about our systems to each other, but we won’t try to dot every t and cross every i.

UML: Class Notation

What do we care about for classes? Here are some possibilities

• The basic components of the class:
  • The fields
  • The methods
• The role of the class in the inheritance hierarchy
• The other classes that the class uses (implicitly)

We will need notations for each of these things.

We may find that we need other notations, too.