Chapter 2: Overview of UML
Overview
The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a notation that you can use for object-oriented analysis and design. This chapter contains a brief overview of UML that introduces you to the subset of UML and the extensions to UML used in this book. For a complete description of UML, see www.omg.org/technology/documents/formal/uml.htm.
Books that are specifically about UML call the pieces of information stored in instances of a class attributes; they call a class’s encapsulations of behavior operations. Those terms, as with UML, are not specific to any implementation language. This book is not language neutral; it assumes that you use Java as your implementation language. It also uses Java- specific terms in most places rather than terms that are language neutral but less familiar to Java programmers. For example, it uses the words attribute and variable interchangeably, with preference for the Java-specific term variable. This book also uses the words operation and method interchangeably, with preference for the Java-specific term method.
UML defines a number of different kinds of diagrams. The rest of this chapter is organized into sections that describe different kinds of UML diagrams and the elements that appear in them.
If you are experienced with object-oriented design, you will find most of the concepts underlying the UML notation to be familiar. If you find many concepts unfamiliar, read only as much of this chapter as you feel comfortable with. When you see a UML diagram in later chapters that contains something that you want explained, come back to this chapter and find a diagram that contains the UML element that you want explained.
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