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Learning UML 2


By Allen Holub
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September 1, 2005 —  (Page 1 of 3)
It’s a paradox that object-oriented systems are both easier to maintain and more complex than procedural systems. That’s one of the reasons, I think, that I’ve had poor luck with hybrid/procedural systems. Hybrid systems seem to combine the bad points of both approaches (difficult maintenance and too much complexity) without the benefit of either.

Even pure OO systems are complicated, however, and without some sort of road map, it’s almost impossible to write, much less maintain, the code. That road map is, more often than not, a set of Unified Modeling Language diagrams that present the structure of the code in graphical form. UML underwent a significant extension last year, adding a bunch of drawing elements and tweaking the existing elements. These modifications were not met with universal praise.

Some of the elements, for example, are experimental. They are concepts that someone on the committee thought would be a good idea but which were not used in practice, and might never be used. Some UML users, including myself, worried that putting an experimental idea into a standard would add complexity without much benefit. Whatever your feelings on the new elements of UML, it will behoove you to learn about them.

Unfortunately, the official OMG UML 2.0 standard is literally thousands of pages of incomprehensible gobbledygook. (Get it from www.uml.org/#UML2.) It’s an interesting comment on the standard that Martin Fowler’s “UML Distilled, Third Edition: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language” (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2004) presents everything of importance in 175 pages. Fowler’s book is a great way to come up to speed with UML if you’re already familiar with both OO and visual modeling. He just presents the notation, assuming that you already know the concepts the notation represents. If you already know UML, this is the book for you.

On the other hand, if you’d like a more tutorial-based introduction to UML, the second edition of “The Unified Modeling Language User Guide,” by Grady Booch, James Rumbaugh and Ivar Jacobson (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2005), just came out. Though Booch & Co. are a bit more academic in their language than I’d like, their presentation is solid, thorough, and like Fowler, vastly more accessible than the actual OMG standard. Booch’s book will be better if you’ve never seen UML before.




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