A few weeks ago I was learning from a course object oriented design in which they taught me class, state machine and sequence diagrams using the The Unified Modeling Language.
I like web development so I asked myself if these diagrams, specifically class diagrams, could be used to model web applications, preferably complex ones.
At first I though this wouldn't be possible since JavaScript is a prototype based language even tho having a class keyword.
Doing a little bit of research I found and read two papers that addressed this.
- Modeling Web Application Architectures with UML (1999)
- A comparison of UML and WAE-UML for the design of Web applications (2005)
The second paper gives good reasons on why use UML to model web apps in chapter 1.4.
What they do to use UML is to extended it with stereotypes, constraints and tagged values, this new extension is called Web Application Extension (WAE).
As you can see these are old papers, the examples that they show are for what today are called server side rendered web apps.
I want to know if any of you have used UML to model web pages or if you like to consider UML to do so.
Top comments (1)
I use UML for sequence diagrams and other architecture diagrams often. It is a great tool to augment documentation on how our internal systems work. I've never used it for class diagram. At my current company we are pretty into micro-services so the classes in any one project are not very complex. Generally I need to describe the interactions between many services for some user flow. UML has been great for this situation.