Authors:
Jaroslav Šnajberk
and
Přemek Brada
Affiliation:
University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic
Keyword(s):
Component, Visualization, UML, Meta-model, Views, Content-aware.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Applications
;
Applications and Software Development
;
Business and Software Modeling Languages
;
Component-Based Software Engineering
;
Cross-Feeding between Data and Software Engineering
;
Meta Programming Systems and Meta-Modeling
;
Model-Driven Software Development
;
Software Engineering
Abstract:
UML is considered to be a universal solution for diagramming any application, but UML also has its shortcomings. It needs several diagrams to describe one problem, it cannot create different views on one diagram and it is not interactive. This leads to hours spent drawing the same thing from different views, any change has to be applied several times and the author of a UML diagram has to balance between good readability and providing a sufficient amount of information. In particular, the UML component diagram has insufficient expressive power to capture all the facts of even today’s component models and architectures. In this paper, we propose a visualization aimed at modular and composed architecture that is content-aware, so it can present the model of component-based architecture in different ways, depending on user needs. By default, it presents minimum information to reduce cognitive load and keep the diagrams comprehensible, while making the additional information available wh
en the user needs it. This paper thus suggests a possible substitute for UML in the domain of component-based applications.
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