Preface

Learning UML is the quintessential tutorial for the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The Unified Modeling Language is a language for communicating about systems: an evolutionary, general-purpose, broadly applicable, tool-supported, and industry-standardized modeling language for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting the artifacts of a system-intensive process.

The UML was originally conceived by, and evolved primarily from, Rational Software Corporation and three of its most prominent methodologists, the Three Amigos: Grady Booch, James Rumbaugh, and Ivar Jacobson. The UML emerged as a standard from the Object Management Group (OMG) and Rational Software Corporation to unify the information systems and technology industry's best engineering practices as a collection of modeling techniques.

The UML may be applied to different types of systems (software and non-software), domains (business versus software), and methods or processes. The UML enables and promotes (but does not require nor mandate) a use-case-driven, architecture-centric, iterative and incremental, and risk-confronting process that is object-oriented and component-based. However, the UML does not prescribe any particular system development approach. Rather, it is flexible and can be customized to fit any method.

The UML is significantly more than a standard or another modeling language. It is a "paradigm," "philosophy," "revolution," and "evolution" of how we approach problem solving and systems. It is often said that the English language is the world's "universal language"; now it is virtually certain that the UML will be the information systems and technology world's "universal language."