May 2002
Intermediate to advanced
416 pages
8h 37m
English
When we formalize a relationship on a class diagram, we capture its static aspects, but we do not capture how the relationship is created or destroyed, nor how it evolves over time. These issues are properly the work of state machines, which are used also to formalize dynamics of relationships between objects.
When an association has an interesting lifecycle, we may abstract an association class and use a statechart diagram to formalize its lifecycle. Because the association class is a class, there is no difference between a state machine for an association class and a state machine for an ordinary, boring class.
Some associations, however, involve some sort of competition for objects representing resources. ...
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