Summary

In this chapter, we looked at how to design separate base and aspect themes with Theme/UML. For base themes, standard UML is all you need. For aspect themes, we looked at minor extensions to standard UML to handle the need to reason about design elements in other themes for the purposes of crosscutting behavioral specification. These primarily relate to extensions to UML's templates. We described how, in aspect themes, you can use templates to represent the triggers for crosscutting behavior that happen outside the aspect themes. You can express the crosscutting behavior that you want to happen before, after, or around the trigger templates using sequence diagrams. We also described how you can indicate that a trigger will become a trigger only within a particular flow of control in the execution of the system.

Along the way in this chapter, we provided designs for many Crystal Game base and aspect themes. Next, we look at what to do now that we have all these themes designed. How do they relate to each other? The answers to this question (and more) are in the next chapter.