April 2006
Beginner to intermediate
283 pages
7h 44m
English
Content preview from Learning UML 2.0
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Chapter 4. Modeling a System’s Logical Structure: Introducing Classes and Class Diagrams
Classes are at the heart of any object-oriented system; therefore, it follows that the most popular UML diagram is the class diagram. A system’s structure is made up of a collection of pieces often referred to as objects. Classes describe the different types of objects that your system can have, and class diagrams show these classes and their relationships. Class relationships are covered in Chapter 5.
Use cases describe the behavior of your system as a set of concerns. Classes describe the different types of objects that are needed within your system to meet those concerns. Classes form part of your model’s logical view, as shown in Figure 4-1.
Figure 4-1. The Logical View on your model contains the abstract descriptions of your system’s parts, including classes
What Is a Class?
Like any new concept, when first coming to grips with what classes are, it’s usually helpful to start with an analogy. The analogy we’ll use here is that of guitars, and my favorite guitar is the Burns Brian May Signature (BMS) guitar, shown in Figure 4-2.
Figure 4-2. One of my guitars: a good example of an object
The guitar in Figure 4-2 is an example of an object. It has an identity: it’s the one I own. However, I’m not going ...
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