I know that object-oriented code could sound abstruse to the listener;
someone else's code (something that I did not design) would seem even more
abstruse to me if I thought that I had to understand it immediately and
didn't. However, I don't have to understand such things immediately, and
the general viewer of the list does not either. Nevertheless, there is
some useful information here and becoming acquainted with it won't hurt :)
It's possible that the method mentioned here (not my own) will become very
prevalent or be influential in the development of shared language for
process modeling.
Related to earlier conversation here about Object Oriented Business
Engineering, the following is information about an object oriented
modeling language whose designers were famous in the object oriented
community for their individual work. In their own words, the language is
useful for business modeling and system development in general as well as
software development.
Software Development Magazine has an interview with the three builders of
the Unified Modeling Language, and more information about (and
representing) their work is available at the Rational Software Corporation
WWW site. Here are quotes from the interview, WWW addresses for particular
information and a few comments about getting to and using the information.
Quotes from Software Development Magazine (12/96) Interview "More than a
notation"
James Rumbaugh - "its concepts are for modeling"
Ivar Jacobson - "It's clear that the three of us have been able to do
something that we would never have been able to do separately."
"First of all, we are describing a language and we are putting a lot of
emphasis that it's a language. That is one of the most important cores of
our work. We are working on three books, two of which are on the language.
None of us have ever been so precise in defining the modeling language,
and I've not seen any other methodologist doing such precise work. The
third book is the process book that shows how we'd like you to apply this
language. The process can be applied in a very generic way: to develop
software, to do business modeling, and to do system development in
general, all using the UML to describe the artifacts of a development
process."
"We have developed a language that is a unification not only of work from
our methodologies but also of modeling languages over different
disciplines like business engineering, software engineering, and process
engineering."
Grady Booch - has the final message for the development community in the
interview - "Modeling is good."
Significant online documentation is available at
http://www.rational.com/ot/uml.html
Most documentation is in Adobe Acrobat format (PDF), so an Acrobat viewer
is required for viewing. Acrobat is free (I think - the Adobe site should
say) and there is a link to the Adobe site from the documentation address.
The most recent information at the address is the Addendum of 9/27/96. The
Unified Modeling Language for Object-Oriented Development Grady Booch,
Ivar Jacobson, James Rumbaugh Addendum is 286K Acrobat file 35pgs - neat
graphics on pgs 9, 12, 25, 26, 28
http://www.rational.com/
WWW Home site for Rational Software Corporation
http://www.rational.com/company/registry.html
The interview includes a comment that the OTUG is the most significant
online discussion of UML. From the Rational WWW site "OTUG - Subscribe to
this e-mail list for the Object Technology Users' Group, an organization
devoted to users of the Booch method and the OMT who are interested in
learning about the use of object technology and the evolution and
unification of object methods. You can also browse the archive of messages
for the mailing list."
Have a nice day
John Paul Fullerton
jpf@myriad.net
--"John Paul Fullerton" <jpf@myriad.net>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>