Java Modeling In Color With UML: Enterprise Components and...

Features

• Textbook Binding: 221 pages
• Published by: Prentice Hall PTR; Har/Cdr edition June 15, 1999
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 013011510X
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0130115102
• Book Dimensions: 10.2 x 8.2 x 1 inches
• Weighs: 2 pounds

Product Review
Java Modeling in Color with UML--printed in color--provides four UML "archetypes" for common entities in business modeling. These have rather abstract names like the moment-interval. Each archetype is assigned a different color in UML. The book uses these four archetypes to model 61 domain-specific business components for manufacturing (including suppliers and inventory control), facilities management, sales, employees, and organizations, plus accounting and document management.

Similar in spirit to software-design patterns, these UML components are catalogued with short prose descriptions and illustrated with UML. The detail here is often impressive, though the type is necessarily small. (Fortunately, the CD-ROM contains all these diagrams--including Java source code--for use within your own designs.) The authors--all experts in UML--have done the heavy lifting here. The idea is to incorporate these components within your own projects.

Besides a catalog of expert components, this book describes the authors' Feature-Driven Development (FDD) software-design process. (While there is one UML standard, design processes still proliferate.) FDD touts good productivity with a minimum of overhead. The authors argue that it can be used productively within today's ever-shorter business cycles.

In all, this book features much more than just color-enhanced UML. It provides a foundation of UML (and Java classes on the CD-ROM) that can model most business problems. If you design with UML, you can surely benefit from this intelligent and visually savvy text. --Richard Dragan

David Anderson, Modeler and Designer
"I went for a job interview. The interviewer asked me to model a payroll system and gave me an hour to work it out while he observed. So I built a model using pink moment-intervals, yellow roles, green things, and blue descriptions-classes, attributes, links, methods, interactions. After 25 minutes the interviewer stopped me, saying I had already gone well beyond what others struggle to do in a full hour! So my recommendation is: read this book! It's made a better modeler out of me and I'm sure it will do the same for you."

Reader Reviews
The people who trashed this book didn't do much with it, that's clear. When you first go to the book (or if you've seen Coad speak, as I did @ JavaOne), you will think that Mr. Rogers is trying to talk you into teaching you a new way to program w/crayons. I was also struck by the proliferation of classes that Coad advocates. However, I have returned to this book a number of times, in part because Coad's tool Together/J is now the preeminent Java/UML tool, it makes Rational look like a set of tinker toys. This last time, I've become quite enamored with what is going on in here. Here are my suggestions: 1. Really try and understand the DNC (domain neutral component). It is a very good approach to a kind of design completeness theorem that I haven't seen much talk about elsewhere. 2. Look at the diagrams. I look at them over and over again. After going a couple of rounds I found that I was becoming addicted to the visualization process, not merely as a representational apparatus, but as a way of actually doing more work/understanding the work I'd already done. If you get the thirty day eval of Together/J and you work through understanding the DNC and color, you'll pass into another dimension from which you will not readily want to return. Plain white UML is dimensionless to me now. All that said, I gave the book a 4 because it really needs an update. The FDD (feature driven development) methodology is not really interesting or appropriate anymore, I think. In the new massively interconnected, distributed component world, features are not what its about anymore, unless you're developing a word processor. Also, the archetypes are based on a non-EJB approach that will change if distributed computing is applied to it, quite significantly. Still this is an important book and combined w/TogetherSoft's tool it's perhaps the best design/UML teaching combo available. There aren't enough books out there that have models for real things in them. This does that and a lot more. Comment | | (Report this)