Wed Yourself to UML with the Power of Associations, Part 2
By thinking of associations as marriages, we've hit on a way of making even complex associations easy to learn. In part 2 of this series on UML associations, we look at a way of upgrading associations to classes, in order to use instantiation.
by Anneke Kleppe,
Jos Warmer
July 6, 2005
n the first article in this series, we explained the concept of associations in UML and showed how to implement them. This article takes that knowledge one step further and explains the UML association class and its implementation. The implementation examples are again written in Java, but you can translate them to another programming language easily. The code examples are all completely generated by the UML/OCL tool called Octopus, which can be downloaded from http://www.klasse.nl/english/research/octopus-intro.html. The code examples themselves can be downloaded here or from the link in the left-hand column.
Association Classes and Their Meaning
After reading our earlier article you might think that implementing an ordinary association is already plenty complicated, but the UML has more in store for us in the form of an association class.
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