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Building Web Applications with UML (The Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series)

Building Web Applications with UML (The Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series)

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: why oh why must authors do this.
Review: I hate it when authors will assume their book is going to read by neophytes so they better include a detailed description of what html is - or what a browser is....

Anyone reading this book is probably looking to design enterprise quality web applications using UML. One would think that based on the title at least...Which is a fairly advanced goal. How would anyone who requires UML exposure not understand a client-server relationship???
This author wastes time and paper droning on about ridiculously obvious topics. Let me give you an example:::

"HTML defines a set of tags that can be used either to tell the browser how to render something or to define a link to another Web page. All tags are enclosed by angled brackets (< and >). Tags are usually used in pairs, with beginning and ending tags. For example, the emphasis tag: <em> italicizes a word. A sample sentence and the HTML to render it follow:"

WOW!!!! How very relevant!!!!
Anyway he's not the first author to increase the book's shipping weight w/ fluff and he probably wont be the last.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great Book
Review: Part I of this book, 25% and 78 pages, is a quick review of HTTP, HTML, and other web technologies. In part II the author proceeds step by step through the typical software engineering phases beginning with requirements definition, illustrating the use of UML tools for the general case of a project where the user interface will be a browser (thick or thin, your choice). Requirements and analysis steps are not particularly heavy with new material; but in the design phase the author nicely extends UML with notations for server pages (ASP, JSP, or other), client pages (HTML, DHTML), forms, framesets, client script objects, etc. There are lots of code shells for the server and the client. The author is clearly a programmer as well as an architect and modeler.

Two of the four appendices are very useful. One summarizes the extensions. Another provides all of the UML diagrams and even code outlines for a small sample project.

The book is heavier on the Microsoft technologies than Java, and it's too bad that the book predates .NET. The concepts are still useful and with some thought can be extended to the richer environment presented by .NET.

Since many projects start with an inflexible constraint that says the user interface will be a browser connecting to an Internet server, someone working on such a project might as well was have his UML reference in a Web flavor. I am aware of only one other book with this specific purpose, and it is for Java and out of date.

Some new concepts, good writing, lots of UML diagrams, and lots of code shells give it four stars.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Not useful at all
Review: The book only covers an overview of modeling, the reference application covers only basic diagraming and looses too much time building diagrams that describe interaction between the web server and the page controller: Aspects already handled automatically by web servers which would be better to oversee.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Not for UML professionals (not enough meat)
Review: This book is not bad as books go. It is a good introduction for beginners but if you want to write real Web applications you will have to look somewhere else (at least this is what I would have to do) My main criticisms and suggestions for improvement are:

1) better explanation of boundary, entity and control objects 2) nowhere is there a mention of statecharts (essential for this kind of application area?) 3) Using packages to suggest that they are the same as architecture is not 100% kosher in my opinion (see page 108) 4) There are other ways to define a logical model for applications than the usual layered model (see again pages 107-108). For example, the SELECT method uses service-based models that are more robust an closure to the real business model. The layers model will be difficult to scale and I am not sure if it is really robust as suggested in the book's cover.

As a buyer, I got carried away by the words 'Web' and 'UML' in the book's title.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Must-have for the Web application designer
Review: This book should have a permanent place on the shelf of any Web application designer/developer. I found the book most useful as reference material. Admittedly, I wish the book had more complex examples (models). Though it does take the reader through a short introduction to designing web applications, its primary value is the presentation of the WAE (Web Application Extension) to UML.

The author is the creator of that notation, and this is the only book I've found that discusses WAE in any depth.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: One of my current favourites
Review: To the reviewer below. The white paper is available on Rational's website. For people who want to know more, read this book.

Part 1 of the book is useful for learning something about the Microsoft way of doing things. I work in a Java, open-source environment designing community web-portal applications. Our applications are medium-sized, but complex.

The second part of the book is good at explaining the workflow and artifacts delivered from architecture, through requirements, analysis, design, to implementation. The process is lightweight, and the book is well written. The The only sections I skipped were the 50-odd pages full of code.

The Web Application Extension (WAE) presented in the book is very useful for designing complex web applications. WAE is starting to become more common. It is catered for in GDPro, and there are plugins for Rational Rose and Visio.

This book complements Rosenberg and Scott's "Use case driven object modelling with UML" well.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Are you a web-project manager ? buy it.
Review: UML was difficult to apply in web-based applications, before
this book was written.


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