Fontoura  The UML Profile for Object Frameworks     A continuing priority of the software industry is re-use ¿ the maximisation of results from development effort by reducing the time and money spent on creating applications from scratch. Frameworks have provided one of the most promising current technologies supporting large-scale re-use, with vast numbers of frameworks developed in the industry for various areas, including graphical frontends, business applications, e-commerce and network servers. Although frameworks have been developed for many different domains, they apply common construction principles. However, the techniques for describing frameworks, particularly the points where application developers need to adapt the framework, have not been fully elaborated. The UML Profile for Object Frameworks provides a UML profile for frameworks in form of UML-compliant extensions that allow the annotation of framework and architectural artifacts. Technical and methodical considerations complement the profile.  If you are a software developer, project manager, researcher or student interested in design patterns, framework technology or UML, this book is essential reading and will enable you to:

• Understand how UML can be harnessed to support framework development more effectively

• Learn a practical approach for framework development and adaptation

• Benefit from several examples and case studies of real-world frameworks

    Features:

• A pragmatic, tried and tested approach to framework development

• How UML may be adapted to the specific needs of framework development

• Real-world case study illustrating principles throughout the book, based on an e-commerce framework

• Accompanying website containing Java code for all the examples and case studies described in the book. Also provides complementary papers and presentation slides of tutorials given in OO conferences.

   About the authors:  Dr. Marcus Fontoura worked as a leader of several framework projects in the last four years. His interests include software engineering tools and environments, object-oriented design, and Web-based software development. He conducts his work at Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, U.S.A  Dr. Wolfgang Pree is a professor of computer science at the University of Constance, Germany, and head of the Software Research Lab. He has worked for many years in various areas of software engineering, in particular focusing on object-oriented software development, frameworks, software architectures, and human-computer interaction.  Dr. Bernhard Rumpe currently conducts research at the Munich University of Technology, Germany. In various publications he contributed to the UML standardization, including discussions of integrated semantics for several UML notations and methodical approaches to use UML more effectively. His interests include management and methodology in e-commerce projects.   

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 5 Ratings

An useful and amusing book - 2002-03-16
Reviewer Rating:
Whenever I read about a new UML profile for something, I wonder whether it will be really useful and also usable. Well, the UML-F profile presented in this book, happens to be both -- useful and usable, for framework developers and users, but also for people interested in frameworks, patterns and OO in general.
It is a very good, easy-to-read book (contents and style):
the authors grasp the reader's attention from the very beginning, with motivating examples and good explanations.

Great book if you are into Frameworks, UML, Design Patterns, - 2002-02-28
Reviewer Rating:
This is a great book! It gives a good insight into Design Patterns, Framework, Components and UML. It is especially useful as it provides a good and practical explanation while combining these concepts.
I have always been into Design Patterns, Framework, Components and UML. Although still missing some points when mixing these concepts. This book definitely provides a good clarification as it goes further into these OO concepts.
In a whole, it's a book worth studying carefully.

Great book! - 2002-03-08
Reviewer Rating:
This book gives a fairly good insight for expanding the concept of UML designs and notations for more practical framework approaches.

Worthwhile to study... - 2002-03-02
Reviewer Rating:
This is a excellent book, since it provides good examples in how using patterns, frameworks and UML in practice.

Good in lots of ways - 2004-04-26
Reviewer Rating:
First, it's a very clear example of how to extend UML within its own rules for extension. Other authors need more than raw UML gives, so start adding cruft any way they want - wrong! UML was meant to be extended and has explicit points at which extension is allowed. This shows extension as it's meant to be done.

Second, it is a worthwhile application area. Frameworks have been around for years, important all out of proportion to the relativley small number of them and relatively small number of framework developers. Framework development deserves attention as a specific discipline, and it's good to see this kind of attention being paid. The authors have chosen parts of well known design patterns for examples, keeping the ideas readable and understandable.

Best, it doesn't try to pull the entire UML standard into the discussion. To tell the truth, if I printed out the whole set of UML standards documents, I'm not sure I'd be able to lift the pile. This uses a well-chosen subset of the standard, but still lets the afficionado use as much more of the standard as desired.

Still, it's just notation. It's a set of tags for making statements about frameworks. The book doesn't really go into the design of frameworks. Framework design appears to be a premise, something the reader already understands well - perhaps not a good assumption.

The real problem with this notation, though, is that it is barely useable without tool support. It's based on sets of tags, which refine other tags (using something like inheritance), which refine yet other tags. Looking at tag A, though, there is no way to know that it refines tag B. Nothing about the tag indicates its family tree of inheritance, or even where to look for the information. Also, the UML extension mechanism for tags appears not to have dealt with global uniqueness at all. Nothing prevents me and you from coming up with the same tag names independently, then causing collisions for our common customer. XML deals with global uniqueness fairly well. If XML conventions are compatible with UML, they should be used - if not, UML needs to create conventions.

On the whole, this is interesting and informative. It's nearly impossible to put to practical use without significant automation, however, and that automation is not available to me.

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