对UML多了很多理解

1. 更多的UML drawing tools. Prefer UMLet for now. Martin Fowlerlikes UMLGraph (I don't have feeling about it now). And Two very suggested UML tools by a guy who have practiced with many UML tools (let's trust him):One is Visual Paradigam and the other is MagicDraw UML.

2. UML Standard is still growing: UML2.3 comes. Martin Fowler's viewpoint is: UML diagram use will become two classes: one embrass UML standard and CASE tool; the other is "UMLAsSketch", just using UML as a way to commucicate designs / understandings of some aspects of the system with each other(Below words is from Martin Fowler's website talking about UMLAsSketch)

 

The essence of sketching is selectivity. With forward sketching you rough out some issues in code you are about to write, usually discussing them with a group of people with your team. Your aim is to use the sketches to help communicate ideas and alternatives about what you're about to do. You don't talk about all the code you are going to work on, just important issues that you want to run past your colleagues first, or sections of the design that you want to visualize before you begin programming. Sessions like this can be very short, a ten minute session to discuss a few hours of programming or a day to discuss a two week iteration.

With reverse engineering you use sketches to explain how some part of a system works. You don't show every class, just those that are interesting and worth talking about before you dig into the code.

Since sketching is pretty informal and dynamic you need to do them quickly and collaboratively, so a common medium is a white board. Sketches are also useful in documents, in which case the focus is communication rather than completeness. The tools used for sketching are lightweight drawing tools and often people aren't too particular about keeping to every strict rule of the UML. Most UML diagrams shown in books, such as mine, are sketches. Their emphasis is on selective communication rather than complete specification. Hence my sound-bite "comprehensiveness is the enemy of comprehensibility"

 

For me, I  am "UMLAsSketch"-er. At least until now, during my almost 4 years career in software development, I have just seen UML is useful to communicate ideas. List three UML viewpoints: UMLAsSketch, UMLAsBluePrint, UMLAsProgrammingLanguage. More knowledge can be got in UML Distilled:

   Sketches are informal diagrams used to communicate ideas, explore alternatives or design in a collaborative manner. They are usually focused on some aspect of the system and are not intended to show every detail of it. Sketch is the most common use of the UML, and it is certainly the way I always use it.

   Blueprints’ purpose, on the other hand, is to describe a system in detail. In the case of forward engineering, the details of the blueprint should be enough for a programmer to code the system. In the case of reverse engineering, the diagrams show all the details of a system in order to understand it better or to provide views of the code in a graphical form.

  The UML can also be used as a programming language. When used in this form, the whole system is specified in the UML, the diagrams are the code, and they are compiled directly into executable binaries. There are some projects and books about that: Executable UML and the MDA (Model Driven Architecture).