Trends In Uml And E-Development
Trends in UML and e-Development
Jim Rumbaugh
Rational Sofware
The Brave New World
The brave new e-world has turned previous assumptions on their head, and old approaches to business or software will no longer succeed. Recent online startups are worth more than venerable corporations that pound steel. Traditional businesses such as banks and stock brokers are scrambling to go online to avoid the loss of their customers to new competitors. Music publishers are fighting free electronic distribution of their products. Even the Supreme Court publishes decisions on the Web.
The e-world is now distributed, concurrent, and connected. Distributed, because information is all over the world, in many different places. The day of the monolithic central machine is long over. Concurrent, because activity is decentralized and simultaneous. Neither business decision making nor software programs can live with a single thread of control. Connected, because an action in one place can have profound effects everywhere. A virus maker in a Third World country can bring down half of the servers on the planet. The simple computer systems, languages, and models of the past are inadequate for today's needs.
There are many drivers of this new world. Ten years ago, the Internet was considered a research toy by most people in industry; now every pizza shop has a Web site (at least in California). More and more companies are entrusting critical operations to enterprise distributed object systems. These object-oriented systems contain distributed servers and databases that are connected to support highly concurrent business operations. More and more industries must interoperate in real time just to do business. Banks, airlines, and telephone companies cannot operate without massive information exchange among all the players in the field. Finally, real-time devices are now ubiquitous in cars, appliances, consumer electronics, buildings....
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