5.6 The Notation

The graphical design notation used in the CASE tool, Freja, is UML.

UML is the result of the efforts of Jim Rumbaugh, Grady Booch and Ivar Jacobson ^[2] to unify their methods: OMT (Object Modeling Technique),Booch and OOSE (Object-Oriented Software Engineering).

The current version of Freja supports Class diagrams.

The class diagrams illustrate the static structure of the model with symbols for class, aggregation, association and specialization. In Freja design diagrams and code are tightly integrated. As a consequence class diagrams can also be seen as an illustration of the static structure of a BETA program. In this sense UML class symbols correspond to BETA patterns, UML aggregations to BETA whole-part and reference compositions and UML specializations to BETA specializations. A symbol that is not directly found as a language construct in BETA is an association.

The most recent updates on the Unified Modeling Language are avialable via the world wide web: http://www.rational.com.