Chapter 1. Fundamentals of UML

On the surface, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a visual language for capturing software designs and patterns. Dig a little deeper, though, and you'll find that UML can be applied to quite a few different areas and can capture and communicate everything from company organization to business processes to distributed enterprise software. It is intended to be a common way of capturing and expressing relationships, behaviors, and high-level ideas in a notation that's easy to learn and efficient to write. UML is visual; just about everything in it has a graphical representation. Throughout this book we'll discuss the meaning behind the various UML elements as well as their representations.