Chapter 1. Why a UML profile for frameworks?

Over the past decade, object technology has gained widespread use in software development. The Java programming language and its associated products have significantly contributed to the broad acceptance of the object-oriented paradigm. Overall, three essential concepts comprise object technology: information hiding, inheritance/polymorphism, and dynamic binding. The mixing ratio of these ingredients defines the flavors of object technology. Object-based systems stress information hiding. Object-oriented systems add inheritance and dynamic binding. Object-oriented frameworks form a special breed of object-oriented systems with extensibility as a key characteristic. This chapter first describes what a UML profile is. It goes on to outline the characteristics of object-oriented frameworks. These characteristics provide more concise means for describing such artifacts necessary than provided by standard UML.