Part I: The UML -F profile

This part presents the notational elements that comprise the UML-F profile. Chapter 1 points out what a profile is and why the development and adaptation of framework architectures requires one.

The UML presentation in Chapter 2 follows a trend in the UML community. As UML has become quite complex, development teams often use subsets for modeling systems. This chapter summarizes a UML subset that has proven useful in several framework projects and thus forms the basis of UML-F. That UML subset stresses class, object, and sequence diagrams.

Chapter 3 discusses the extension mechanism that UML-F relies on. The tag concept is defined as a unification and improvement of the UML extension mechanisms tagged values and stereotypes. This chapter also presents the basic UML-F tags used for framework modeling.

Chapter 4 builds on the basic tags in Chapter 3. It defines the tags for the framework construction principles, and discusses how to define tags for modeling and annotating design patterns.

Chapter 5 describes how UML-F tags and adaptation cookbooks can be used together to support a framework user in the adaptation process. It presents recipes for some of the framework construction principles discussed in Chapter 4.