UML Diagrams

Hello everyone and welcome back to another week of my blog. This week I will be talking about UML diagrams. UML stands for Unified Modeling Language and it is used to model business, application structures, programming languages, analysis, design, and implementation of software-based systems. In other words, it is a way to visually represent the design and implementation of complex software. There can be many lines of codes in your software and it can be difficult to keep track of all the class relationships and hierarchies. UML diagrams can make it easier for developers to see the relationships and hierarchies. UML diagrams can work for many different programming languages. It is a standardized modeling language that any language can incorporate into the language of their choosing.

There are two different types of UML diagrams. The two different types are structural and behavioral. Structural UML diagrams show how a system is structured. They show how classes and object components work together and show the relationships between those components. Behavioral UML diagrams on the other hand, show how a system would behave from the objects interacting with each other in it. In this class I am currently taking at Worcester State University, we look at the design and structure of programs through structural UML diagrams. We went through different versions of a “DuckSimulator” and its UML diagrams to see how the program can be improved. When given a difficult concept to add to the DuckSimulator, we were able to come up with a solution through the UML diagram because we could visually see how adding interface classes would affect the DuckSimulator.

The DuckSimulator structural UML diagram we used was a class diagram intended to be written in Java. UML diagrams are very commonly used to represent software that is based on object orientated programming because they can easily show the different classes with their attributes and behaviors as well as the relationships between each class. Class diagrams are split into three vertical sections. The section at the top is the name of the class, the section in the middle are the attributes, and the section at the bottom are the methods. Types of variables and return types of methods are indicated after the name and a colon (id : int). Typically the attributes in the middle section of each class are private variables indicated by a minus sign (-) before the name. Classes can be linked together with many different arrows to show relationships between them. UML diagrams are very powerful at representing a program written with a object orientated language.

https://creately.com/blog/diagrams/uml-diagram-types-examples/
 

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