What's Next for the UML?
Because it offers standardization for notation, modeling artifacts, and semantics, the UML has been a wakeup call for developers eager to work at a higher level of abstraction. In addition to EJB component-based and object-oriented software projects, UML is also able to earn its keep in non-OO software development, like procedural or relational database applications. Despite the best efforts of methodologists such as Ambler and vendors like Rational Software in promoting a standardized way to map objects to relational databases, it seems likely that many or most of these efforts are doomed to failure.

Even though database systems have been around for many years, industry analysts say that 80 percent of the electronic data in companies is unstructured (that is, it resides outside of databases, typically in text files). With the explosion of the World Wide Web and the appearance of content-based search engines (such as Google, AltaVista and Yahoo), it is becoming increasing clear that we can access data successfully even in the absence of a database.

Because much Web data is fragmented, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to store this data in a bunch of RDBMS tables and then access that data with relational connectors. And with the XML revolution organizing content in a more structured, more semantically meaningful form than HTML, it is increasing likely that developers will want to take a more responsibility-driven or object-oriented (as opposed to data-centric) approach to their applications.

Because they're no longer willing to put all their eggs in one vulnerable RDBMS basket, it's also likely that developers will increasingly turn to UML to raise the level of abstraction of their new Web-based systems, especially if those systems are built of societies of collaborating objects. Although the relational model was a powerful and useful concept in its time, the immediate future will all be about objects and Internet-based UML applications and tools.

Roger Smith is former technical editor of Software Development magazine. He has been a software developer for more than 15 years.

Tool Support

Back to Introduction

In this Article
Introduction	What's Next for the UML?
Tool Support