If you ever had to create the architecture for a IT project you’ve surely heard of UML Diagrams. In this tutorial series I will show you how the UML Class Diagramm works with a few practical examples.
UML is used to showcase the architecture of your system by giving you the tools to show the relations between your classes, the use cases for your system or how the classes interact with each other.
First let’s take a look at how a class is represented in a UML Class diagram.
In this image you can see a pretty standard class with some attributes and operations.
In the top row we write the name of the class. In the lower box all the attributes are listed and in the lowest box all methods of the class are shown.
To specify the visibility of the method/attribute we use +/#/-/~.
For a public attribute/method we use the plus sign (+). For protected visibility (#), for private (-) and for package (~).
To show that a method or attribute is static we underline it. If the class should be abstract we write the class name and the abstract functions in italic.
In the next article we’ll talk about relations between classes.