Nodes
A node is a physical entity that can execute artifacts. Nodes can vary in size from a simple embedded device to a server farm. Nodes are a critical piece of any deployment diagram because they show where a particular piece of code executes and how the various pieces of the system (at the execution level) communicate.
You show a node as a 3D box with the name of the node written inside. However, possibly more than any other classifier in UML, modelers typically use specific icon representations of nodes to help convey the type of hardware represented. Figure 6-5 shows a simple node as a cube, as well as example icon representations.
Figure 6-5. Several nodes using the cube representation, and some example icon representations
Previous versions of UML did not define any specializations of a node. UML 2.0 specializes a node into two different aspects of hosting code: the required software and the required hardware. Therefore, it is less common to see a generic node in UML 2.0 diagrams than it was in UML 1.x. See "Execution Environments" and "Devices" for more information.
Execution Environments
An execution environment is a specialized node that represents a software configuration hosting specific types of artifacts. An execution environment is expected to provide specific services to hosted artifacts by means of mutually agreed upon interfaces. For example, a Java 2 Enterprise ...
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