DESIGN VIEW is the summary of the complete DESIGN SOLUTION contributed article, which begins on Page 2.
There's much hoopla surrounding the upcoming UML 2.0 specification. Soon enough you will be able to take advantage of elaborated interfaces and ports, interaction fragments and operators, plus beter modeling of behavior over time. However, UML 2.0 is many months from being released in its final form—let alone being voted on and adopted. A number of questions are being raised about the spec due to conflicting reports. This article offers some answers.
Four related requests for proposals (RFPs) exist for the UML 2.0: Infrastructure, Object Constraint Language (OCL), XML Metadata Interchange (XMI), and Superstructure. The superstructure RFP is the one that most users (those who construct real models and build systems that work in the real world) will care about, since the proposal contains the most "user-visible" parts of UML 2.0.
Two main forces drive the RFP's requirements: scalability and architecture. Changes made for architecture in UML 2.0 primarily involve the structural (class) model, while changes for scalability are best seen in the improved sequence diagrams.
According to the RFP, UML 1.x notions of interface and architecture must be enhanced to support and simplify support for standard component frameworks and architectures. Moreover, data-flow modeling must be added, relationship semantics have to be clarified, and sequence diagrams need enhancing.
Discussion within the article focuses on structured classes, statechart inheritance, and sequence and timing diagrams. A series of figures help to illustrate these segments.
Though UML 2.0's final release is months away, some major features and characteristics are already known, giving users a preview to improved architectural modeling.
Full article begins on Page 2