What is Unified Modeling Language (UML)?
UML (Unified Modeling Language), a modeling language consisting of an integrated set of diagrams, developed to help system and software developers for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting the artifacts of software systems, as well as for business modeling and other non-software systems.
The Origin of UML
In 1994, Jim Rumbaugh, the creator of OMT, stunned the software world when he left General Electric and joined Grady Booch at Rational Corp. The aim of the partnership was to merge their ideas into a single, unified method (the working title for the method was indeed the “Unified Method”).
By 1995, the creator of OOSE, Ivar Jacobson, had also joined Rational, and his ideas (particularly the concept of “Use Cases”) were fed into the new Unified Method — now called the Unified Modelling Language1. The team of Rumbaugh, Booch and Jacobson are affectionately known as the “Three Amigos”
UML also includes new concepts that were not present in other major methods at the time, such as extension mechanisms and a constraint language.
Why UML
The primary goals in the design of the UML summarize by Page-Jones in Fundamental Object-Oriented Design in UML as follows:
- Provide users with a ready-to-use, expressive visual modeling language so they can develop and exchange meaningful models.
- Provide extensibility and specialization mechanisms to extend the core concepts.
- Be independent of particular programming languages and development processes.
- Provide a formal basis for understanding the modeling language.
- Encourage the growth of the OO tools market.
- Support higher-level development concepts such as collaborations, frameworks, patterns and components.
- Integrate best practices.
