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As your project grows, UModel® 2008 offers additional diagram types to help you design and communicate your higher-level architecture.

In addition to the other diagram types, UModel® 2008 supports packages, package diagrams, component diagrams, and deployment diagrams to help you conveniently design, organize, and document your project architecture.

Packages are used to group classes or other elements under a single namespace and are drawn as a rectangle with a smaller tab at the upper left.

Packages are useful for collecting related classes so they can be referenced more concisely in top level view drawings of the project architecture. A large project can easily require hundreds of class diagrams, so packages become an efficient organizing tool.

Packages are also a good way to organize reusable entities. Some programmers like to use packages to represent other systems and subsystems that interact with the project being modeled. You can also drag packages from the UModel® 2008 diagram tree into new diagrams.

Package diagrams display the organization of packages and their elements, as well as corresponding namespaces. Package diagrams are typically used to depict the high-level organization of a software project. You can draw package diagrams yourself or you can direct UModel® 2008 to generate a package dependency diagram for any package in the Model Tree.

The UModel® 2008 package diagram toolbar enables quick entry of packages, profiles, and package relationships:

• Package dependency
• Package import
• Package merge
• Profile application

To direct UModel® 2008 to generate a package dependency diagram, simply select any package from the Model Tree and choose Package Dependencies from the right-click menu:

The resulting diagram reveals the dependencies of the package.

You can also generate package dependency diagrams during reverse engineering to help analyze the structure of an existing application.

Component diagrams illustrate the physical structure of the code, mapping the logical view of the project classes to the actual code where the logic is implemented. When generating code, the component diagrams represent the location of the Java or C# source code files for your classes. When reverse engineering an existing project, the component diagrams can help you correlate each UModel® 2008 class diagram with the source code files.

You’ll specify the directory for the source code corresponding to your model in the component diagram properties window. This is where you tell UModel to store all generated code for every diagram type, and it is also where you tell it to find code to use for reverse engineering

UModel® 2008 includes a component toolbar with realization arrows, which assign each class to a component, and other elements you’ll want when drawing component diagrams. UModel® 2008 makes it easy to create a new component from either the toolbar or a context-sensitive right-click menu. Then you can copy and paste project classes from your class diagrams or drag them from the model tree window, and assign classes to a component by drawing realization arrows.

Deployment diagrams provide a picture of the physical architecture of the hardware, software, and artifacts of the system. Deployment diagrams can be thought of as the opposite end of the spectrum from use cases, depicting the physical form of the system as opposed to conceptual pictures of users and devices interacting with the system.

The UModel® 2008 deployment diagrams toolbar incorporates uniquely colored 3D boxes to represent each system node, execution environment, and device in the realized system.

Deployment diagrams are an important element of system documentation that can assist in planning complex projects with artifacts, such as executable files, data files, XML documents, and configuration files, which will ultimately reside on separate hardware platforms. Clear and detailed deployment diagrams also allow larger teams to better understand the entire project architecture.

Like other UModel diagrams, packages, components, and deployment diagrams have quick editing buttons, entry helpers, and all the alignment options available from the layout toolbar. You can also add notes to any diagram to clarify your intent.

Find out how easy it can be to create a superior graphical blueprint of your software development project. Download a free trial of Altova UModel® 2008 today.