UML Designer User's Guide


Going from analysis to design

The analysis phase of a "forward" development process yields protocols and message specifications. These elements can in turn be used to generate implementation code.

Although much of the actual implementation of your program logic is still up to you, some of the structure of objects and methods can often be deduced from protocols and their message specifications. When you transform a protocol into a class design, UML Designer can also generate an actual Smalltalk or Java class with attributes and stub methods based on the messages of the protocol. Depending on the idioms of the protocol messages, it might also be able to generate default implementation code for the method.

UML Designer can generate both class and instance methods, although if you are generating Java there are some limitations on class attributes. Class methods are specified by a class conformance relationship between the protocol and the implementation class; instance methods are specified by an instance conformance relationship. (You can specify class or instance conformance when you transform a protocol to a class design.)


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