XMI is a great technology for anyone who builds applications from models, allowing you to use information contained in those models for big upside. But if you want your model data to be effective, components are an essential building block. Learn to get your dependencies straight by making traceable components.
by Mark Goetsch
January 3, 2006
his fourth installment in an ongoing series on XMI leads me to a discussion of components. Components are an essential building block of your data model and are thus a valuable asset to any developer who is using models and XMI. In this article, I will discuss how components are linked together and how they interact with nodes, UML's method of representing hardware. This article should give the final pieces to building a system that can track software dependencies on an enterprise scale. The idea is very similar to what many banks are building to track their software assets.
So just what, exactly, is a component? I discussed that very issue in the opening paragraph of an earlier article on component diagrams, but here I am really just concerned with what it means from a data perspective. The data that we are concerned about answers the questions: How many components do I have that have the same attributes? Which component depends upon other components?
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his fourth installment in an ongoing series on XMI leads me to a discussion of components. Components are an essential building block of your data model and are thus a valuable asset to any developer who is using models and XMI. In this article, I will discuss how components are linked together and how they interact with nodes, UML's method of representing hardware. This article should give the final pieces to building a system that can track software dependencies on an enterprise scale. The idea is very similar to what many banks are building to track their software assets.
