From the course: iOS Development: Architecture

A brief introduction to UML

From the course: iOS Development: Architecture

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A brief introduction to UML

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- [Narrator] Throughout this course, I'll be explaining software design related concepts. To represent these ideas, we'll use a graphical notation called Unified Modeling Language. The Unified Modeling Language, in sort, UML, defines a set of diagrams that help in designing and communicating software systems. I'm going to introduce the most popular diagram types. UML has many diagrams, but we focus on the essential ones that we use in this course. For a more in-depth discussion about UML, check out the advanced chapters from Programming Foundations: Object-Oriented Design by Simon Allardice. First, we'll talk about the use case diagram, which describes the functionality of a system from the user's point-of-view. Next, we'll take a look at the class diagram. Class diagrams help us describe the structure of a software system in terms of classes, attributes, operations, and the relations between them. UML also lets us model dynamic behavior. You'll get to know the sequence diagram that's used to express how the objects interact with each other in a specific scenario. I'd like to mention that UML is independent of any programming language. We can use UML to provide the detailed blueprint of a system. Then we start coding our system based on this blueprint. UML diagrams can be converted to source code written in any object oriented programming language. There are different UML design tools, but we can use pen and paper or a whiteboard to quickly sketch our designs. I've created all the diagrams in this course with StarUML. You can download StarUML for free from here.

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