Executable UML: A Foundation for Model Driven Architecture

Customer Reviews:

Comprehensive and well-written.......2003-08-21

Having worked for an organization that has implemented a model-driven architecture technology approach to create highly robust software applications I can attest to the practical value of translatable models and the information and techniques in this book.

I have always been a fan of the rigor and completeness of the Shlaer-Mellor methodology and this book distils this rigor into a profile of UML that hopefully will inspire a wider audience to look at the reality of creating executable and translatable models.

I found the book extremely well written and very complete in its treatment of every aspect of the subject from basic UML ideas through to model compilers. Unlike many technical texts I found absolutely no fluff in this book - each sentence and section has been carefully worded to be clear, consistent and unambiguous - a breath of fresh air for a pedant like myself.

I have used this book (along with Leon Starr's "Executable UML: How to Build Class Models") as a reference for my course development work on executable UML and found it invaluable. The table of contents and index are complete and well put together - something that I feel is crucial in any reference text.

I highly recommend this book for anyone using UML for software development who wants to explore this new technology of building executable and translatable models - and have it explained clearly and comprehensively.

Author correction.......2003-08-13

The review from "A reader" is erroneous. There is no review from "Leon Brooks," so it is unlikely there is any business relationship with a non-existent person.

I imagine "A reader" meant Leon *Starr* who runs an entirely separate business from those run by either of the authors. Sure, we talk and refer business each other's way, but that is to be expected. Please delete "A reader"'s review.

(If you know Leon, you'd know he says what he really thinks, even if--especially?--it's bad!)

Good ideas bear up well over time........2002-12-01

Two events at the Object-Oriented Systems, Languages, and Applications Conference of 1996 were memorable for me. The first was the opening address given by one of the more insightful architects/designers of the 20th century, Christopher Alexander. And the second was a debate between Stephen Mellor (one of the authors of this book) and Grady Booch on the topic "Translation: Myth or Reality?". Six years later, with the addition of Action Semantacs to UML, the Model Driven Architecture initiative of the Object Management Group, and the publication of this book, it appears that Mr. Mellor is as persistent in his position that executable (and hence translatable) models are indeed a reality, as Mr. Alexander was that the resonance between the structure of a solution and the corresponding problem is a measure of the solution's quality. Good ideas bear up well over time.

Mr. Mellor, and this book, are not for the faint hearted. It is his position that building software systems should be more about engineering a solution than artfully handcrafting one, and that to do this, one needs a disciplined process and a rigorous and precise engineering tool: Executable UML. If you agree with this tenet, and accept its implied challenge--or just want to know where they will lead you--this is a book for you.

In this book, Mellor and Balcer present a very lean and agile profile of UML and define the underlying execution semantics that enable it to be used as a valuable engineering tool for analyzing, designing, and implementing your systems. They also prescribe an engineering process to follow when modeling a software system, and thoughtfully walk the reader through this process and the various UML models with numerous examples and real-world experiences. If you use UML to model software, and aspire to engineer that software in the process, this book will give you a lot to think about and add significantly to your engineering tool chest.

New Notation, Old Failures.......2002-07-30

The book recasts Shlaer-Mellor OOA into UML notation while preserving all advantages and failures of the first.
The authors failed to realized that in contemporary, commoditized software market the winner is not the product that has the greater number of functional requirements implemented (they will all do), but the one that has better addressed non-functional requirements and software engineering "-ilities". Both non-functional requirements and "-ilities" originate design forces that can only be addressed by the model compiler. Not surprisingly, the authors delegate the OOA of model compilation domain to another, yet to be written tome.
The authors' analogies to high-level language compilation are, at best, incomplete. One must always remember that after decades of research a new compiler must still be built for every advanced "metal". Contemporary distributed object-oriented systems present a continuously changing landscape of such "metal".
Executable UML will be useful to System Engineers interested in "animating" functional requirements and analysis-level concurrencies. However, no incremental way of building OOA models has been suggested. It seems that the authors subscribe to "just do it" approach. The view-of-participated-objects (invented by Ivar Jacobson and popularized by Mike Ackroyd) could be a better alternative.
Software engineers may find some of the terminology confusing. A subsystem, for example, is not defined as a center of execution, but as a subdomain.
Overall, the book presents little added value to already skilled in Shlaer-Mellor OOA. For the newcommer to the world of translational methodology, the book raises a false hope for the out-of-the-box model compilation -- the claims of exponential growth in model compiler availability have already been made in the past.

A UML profile for serious system development.......2002-07-22

If you have ever diligently tried to implement a software system using a graphical modeling technique such as UML, I suspect your first attempts,like mine, were less than satisfying. It probably went something like this. Starting with some shiny new UML tool you start drawing diagrams. After a while, things seem "squishy". It's hard to know exactly where to stop modeling. Some things have a clear correspondence to the implementation that you know you have to get to, but many, many other issues crop up that you decide you have to defer to the details of the implementation. At some point in time you convince yourself that you understand the problem very well and then just start coding the implementation. It can be a bit like the Twilight Zone. In the end you wonder just what all those diagrams, which are probably out of date with respect to the implementation, were for.

Fortunately, Mellor and Balcer have given us some real help here. This book is a comprehensive presentation of how to give UML executable semantics. I feel that the emphasis on execution semantics is key. When you write code, you are able to execute it in your head and verify that you think it's correct. You may still make mistakes and introduce bugs, but the process
is concrete. The same definiteness needs to be there when you are modeling. If the model is to be truly a more abstract representative of the system you are designing then you must be able the "execute" the model and predict how the system will behave in its ultimate implementation. And, of course, if the model is that definite then it should be possible to derive automatically the implementation from the model. All of this and much more is discussed in detail in this book. If you struggle, like I do, to deal with your systems problems at a higher
level of abstraction, this is a book you need to read.

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Executable UML: A Foundation for Model Driven Architecture
et al Stephen J. Mellor
Manufacturer: Addison-Wesley Professional
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

UML | Software Design, Testing & Engineering | Programming | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B000OP0GVY

Book Description

A Child's First Drawing Book

With this simple teaching method, every child can learn to draw!

Designed as a child's first art series, Kids Can Draw will help any child learn the basics of drawing. It's as easy as drawing a triangle, circle, or square. By starting with these basic shapes, your child can create a dolphin, starfish, sailboat, or anything in the ocean.

The Kids Can Draw method provided a fun, effective way for your child to learn basic drawing skills and achieve amazing results.

Customer Reviews:

The "Kids Can Draw" series is great!.......2000-01-16

All of the books in the "Kids Can Draw" series are great for kids who are just learning to draw. It teaches how to put shapes together using basic steps. This book has given my 5 year old confidence in her drawing ability. I would recommend this book, or any book in this series, for children. However, it is also good for beginning drawers of all ages. If you can hardly draw a straight line, this book is for you. And the price ain't bad either.

Amazon.com

Robert Doisneau: A Photographer's Life covers the renowned work of the French photographer famous for the 1950 picture Le Baiser de le Hotel de Ville. This frequently reproduced portrait of an attractive couple frozen in an embrace while Parisian city life whirls around them is an archetypal emblem of romance. It's pretty surprising to learn that Doisneau hired young actors for his entire kissing series; nevertheless, the moment rings undeniably true. Maybe it's his beginnings in advertising or his fashion work for Vogue that lend his images equal parts of real life and theater.

Doisneau (1912-1994) spent his lifetime recording life in France. With his combination of photojournalism and art, he captured nightclubs, the Parisian working-class suburbs, national monuments, weddings, and famous folk like Picasso. Some of the most riveting pictures are of resistance fighters in the midst of the Occupation--young men in civilian clothes, sportcoats and all, standing with guns behind homemade barricades. Accompanying the hundreds of pictures are in-depth chapters that discuss the different periods in Doisneau's life and work. From his childhood, through the war, and on to his fascination with the banlieues (suburbs), the well-researched text gives invaluable insight into this influential photographer's practice. --J.P.Cohen

Book Description

The first authorized biography available, Robert Doisneau provides an intimate and rich account of the life of the French photographer who captured the streets and elusive spaces of Paris as the city entered the modern era. Perhaps best known as the creator of romantic images of Paris-particularly The Kiss (Le Baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville)-Doisneau is, in fact, a key figure in the history of documentary photography. His passion was to notice and record the ordinary life around him, presented by chance, "like a bouquet." He photographed everything from local weddings to heads of states, from a homeless drunk asleep over a subway grate to a masked ball in a Venetian palace, recording the marginal and transitory zones recognized by Charles Baudelaire and later by Walter Benjamin as the symbolic, shifting landscapes of modern life.

Drawing not only upon Doisneau's previously unpublished archives but also on conversations with the photographer in his final years, this book examines every aspect of Doisneau's work, including the techniques he used. Emphasized are his periods of engagement with the birth of photojournalism in the 1930s; with humanist social realism in the 1940s and 1950s; and with montage and art brut in the 1960s. The photographs, made by Doisneau on his own and while working for Vogue, Life, and other well-known magazines, reveal how the familiar is swept away, a theme germane to city-dwellers everywhere.

Peter Hamilton portrays Doisneau's "telescopic" life as a series of vignettes, fortuitous encounters, and friendships with a cast of larger-than-life characters, including Blaise Cendrars, Fernand Léger, Jacques Prévert, and Robert Giraud. Doisneau grew up at the edge of the Parisian banlieue, a zone between town and country to which he continually returned in order to capture the life of a place where, as he said, "you went either to play, to make love, or to commit suicide." He came of age along with his profession, and Hamilton not only details this social history but in a personal and resonant style includes Doisneau's own voice, chronicling his developing perception of his life's work as a collection of images that constitute "a surrealist project," "a little theater" of the worlds he passed through.

Illustrated with more than four hundred photographs in duotone, many published for the first time, Robert Doisneau: A Photographer's Life resembles what Doisneau loved most, "the flower that grows between the railway tracks, infinitely more interesting than flowers in vases."

500 duotne and 20 full-color illustrations
368 pages
9 1/2 x 9 1/2"
Trade Cloth

Customer Reviews:

Wonderful!.......2003-01-06

This book is a marvelously comprehensive collection of Doisneau's work. The photographs are beautifully reproduced, and reflect the character of a city and its people with humor, pathos, and great dignity. The text is clear, concise, and extremely insightful, with some extraordinary quotes and commentary from not only Doisneau himself, but other gifted artists of his time. A book to treasure!

Delightful!.......1999-01-02

Delightful photographs in fine reproduction with interesting and readable insight into the man behind the camera.

It was terrible!.......1998-12-16

It was really boring and I didn't like how the author rambled on and on about nothing important at all. It was the most awful book I have ever read.

Portrait de Saint-Denis (Collection Portrait de la France)

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Portrait de Saint-Denis (Collection Portrait de la France)
Robert Doisneau
Manufacturer: Calmann-Levy
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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ASIN: 2702120598

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Robert Doisneau a Photographers Life
Peter Hamilton
Manufacturer: ABBEVILLE PRESS +
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Robert Doisneau: A Photographer's Life
Robert] Hamilton, Peter [Doisneau
Manufacturer: Abbeville
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Product Description

In this issue: Donal Duck :The Three Caballeros ; Mickey Mouse: Right Mouse for the Job ; Huey,Dewey and Louie: Sons of The Moon...and more...

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The Infernal Grove opens with the author in Geneva preparing a survey and then back to India as assistant editor of the Calcutta Statesman. Next, he went home to England, working on the Evening Standard and living in rural Sussex on a base income of five pounds a week. These "happiest years" of his life ended with the coming of World War II.

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The infernal grove
Malcolm Muggeridge
Manufacturer: Morrow
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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The Infernal Grove, Chronicles of wasted time - number 2

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THE INFERNAL GROVE (HIS CHRONICLES OF WASTED TIME)

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The Infernal Grove : Chronicles of Wasted Time Volume 2

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The Infernal Grove : Chronicles of Wasted Time Volume 2
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Binding: Mass Market Paperback
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Book Description

1927. Madame David-Neel's travels in remote parts of Asia, including her fifth expedition, a journey to Tibet, of which she gives a short account in the present book, were undertaken as the result of certain peculiar circumstances. The idea of visiting Lhasa became implanted in her mind. Before the frontier post to which she had been escorted, she took an oath that in spite of all obstacles, she would reach Lhasa and show what the will of a woman could achieve.

My journey to Lhasa [microform]: The personal story of the only white woman who succeeded in entering the forbidden city

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My journey to Lhasa [microform]: The personal story of the only white woman who succeeded in entering the forbidden city
Alexandra David-Neel
Manufacturer: Harper
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Binding: Unknown Binding

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ASIN: B0006EJW18

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