Applications And Benefits Of UML And UI Mark-up Language In Essay.

Explains about the applications of mobile computing,dimensions of mobile computing,comditions of the mobile users as well as architecture of mobile software applications.

Dimensions of Mobile Computing

UML i.e. Unified Modeling Language is defined as a standard documentation which is used for modelling the real-world objects. This language is combined with graphical notations and is used in creating the design and development of the models. It is also used for evaluating the set of objects along with the relationship between them (Booch, Rumbaugh, & Jacobson, 2005).

UML is an extensible language. For the purpose of customization it has two elements which are profiles and stereotypes. To serialize the UML model XMI i.e. markup interchange is used. Along with its usage in modeling software it is also used in building models for business processes, for system engineering and for organization structures. There are many importance of Unified Modeling Language as it works as a catalyst for the technologies which are dependent on the models for example, Model Driven Development and Model Driven Architecture. Another importance of UML is that it supports many features like data analysis, time analysis, state charts and object oriented structure design (SmartDraw, 2016).

There are many benefits and advantages of UML because it is very flexible in nature. It is easy to customize the modeling elements and the intercommunication in a UML diagram in accordance to the technologies.  UML is also used in documentation of the software architecture because it lets the software developer asses the performance of the software. It provides guidelines for the software are which are under the process of development and checks the security and keeps track of the process. UML also provides parallel designing i.e. all the subsystems are designed independently. It is also used for designing the activities scheduling because it refines the requirements. Apart from this, the development costs of the UML are very low and provide a brief description of the working of the software. The developed systems are memory and processor efficient systems. Hence, designing software with the help of UML provides a more efficient system (Visual, 2016).

There are 14 types of Unified Modeling Language diagrams which are categorised as structural diagrams, behaviour diagrams and implementation view diagrams.

The structure view consists of seven diagrams and it focuses on the things which are essential to be present in the system which is getting modelled.

1. Class Diagram- The class diagram is used to determine the core structure of the system. It defines the system’s classes along with their attributes and the relationship among the classes.
2. Composite Structure Diagram- This diagram is basically used to define the internal structure of the classes along with the possible associations of the structure.
3. Component Diagram- The component diagram splits the software system into different components and then establishes dependencies among these components.
4. Deployment Diagram- These diagrams determines the hardware’s which are used in the implementation of the system along with the changes made on the old hardwares and the environment of the execution of the system.
5. Object Diagram- At a specific time, the complete or may be partial view of the structure of the modelled system is determined by object diagrams.
6. Package Diagram- These diagrams determines the methods which are used to define the way in which the whole system is split up into logical groups. It also describes the inter dependencies among these groups.
7. Profile Diagram- These diagrams shows the stereotypes in the form of classes and defines profiles as packages using the <<stereotype>> and <<profile>> stereotypes respectively. They always operate at the Meta Model level(Abrams & Helms, 2004).

There are seven types of behaviour view diagrams and describes the behaviour of the system which is getting modelled. Therefore, these diagrams are used to describe the functionality of the software systems.

1. Use Case Diagram- This diagram defines the functionality which is provided by the system in terms of actors and their goals are defined in terms of use cases. A proper relationship is defined between the actors and the use cases.
2. Activity Diagram- This diagram represents the workflow of the components in a system step-by-step i.e. it describes the overall flow of the control.
3. State Machine Diagram- These diagrams describes the states and the state transitions of the system.
4. Sequence Diagram- These diagrams describe the way by which the objects interact with each other in a particular scenario of a use case(Oliver, 2017).
5. Communication Diagram- These diagrams are similar to the sequence diagram but they mostly show the collaboration of the objects in place of the time sequence.
6. Interaction Overview Diagram- These diagrams describes the flow of control of the interactions i.e. they provide a link between the objects.
7. Timing Diagram- These diagrams shows the behaviour of the objects in a given period of time.

Architecture of Mobile Software Applications

The implementation view diagrams consists of the components diagrams. These diagrams are different from other diagrams in terms of nature and behaviour. Component Diagrams are used to make executable systems and are used to visualise the relationship among the components of the system (Tavangarian, 2009).

User Interface Mark-up Language is a declarative Extensive Mark-up Language which is used to define user interfaces. UIML came into existence because it easily cut downs the time which is required in the development of user interfaces for multiple device families. The main goal of UIML is that it provides a format which is used to describe the blend which map to various multiple devices. One of the key factors of UIML is that it does not incorporate few tags i.e. the platform-specific and metaphor-dependent tags (Stanciulescu, 2008). With each platform-specific tag there is a language gadget-set associated which define the interface in the target platform. There are four components in a UIML document i.e. <Head>, <interface>, <peers> and <template>. The actual user interface is represented by the <interface> component in the UIML documentation. The four main components of <interface> are as follows,

1. <Structure>- It defines the relationship between the different UI elements present within an interface. Every structure has parts and each part defines the platform-specific UI element which is in a type of combination with at least one class of different UI elements.
2. <Style>- All the properties and the values of the interface are represented by style. Few of the properties which are included in the parts of the Graphical User Interfaces are background colour, foreground colour, font, etc.
3. <Content>- The content of each and every interface is displayed by <content>. With the help of this, it gets easy to create interfaces which use multiple languages.
4. <Behaviour>- The behaviour represents the set of conditions and the actions within rules of an interface. There are two conditions of UIML. The first is whenever an action occurs while the second is occurred when any value of some data of an event is equivalent to a particular value.

The Unified Modeling Language uses many different types of diagrams to represent the software while the User Interface Mark-up Language is used to define user interfaces (Duce, Gomes, Hopgood, & Lee, 2012).

The User Interface Development is basically designed in an information device with the help of which human beings interact with the device and then respond to it. There are three main types of user interfaces,

1. Command language: the user must know the machine and program-specific instructions or codes.
2. Menus: the user chooses the commands from the lists which are displayed on the screen.
3. Graphical User Interface: the user gives the commands by selecting and clicking on the icons which are displayed on the screen.

The Graphical User Interface uses the approach of UIML in building applications which are accessible on multiple platforms. GUIs have two main components i.e. dynamic or the behaviour part and the static or layout part. The dynamic part is designed with the help of UML while the layout part is designed by UIML. GUI uses two types of components i.e. the Command Line Interface and the GUI Wrappers. The designing parts which include screen area and the point and dimensions are defined by UML. Hence, the UIML have many advantages on generic user interface because it defines the interfaces easily. All the versions of Microsoft Windows make use of GUI (Ma, Siu, Wong, & Zhong, 2015).

Conclusion

UML i.e. Unified Modeling Language is defined as a standard documentation which is used for modelling the real-world objects. It is an extensible language. There are 14 diagrams in UML which are used to define the structure of the software and make the development easy.

User Interface Mark-up Language is a declarative Extensive Mark-up Language which is used to define user interfaces. The Graphical User Interface uses the UIML in building applications. It has two components; the dynamic part is designed by UML while the layout is designed by the UIML.

References

Abrams, M., & Helms, J. (2004). User Interface Markup Language. Retrieved 9 February 2018, from https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/5937/%20uiml-core-3.1-draft-01-20040311.pdf

Booch, G., Rumbaugh, J., & Jacobson, I. (2005). The unified modeling language user guide. New Delhi: Addison-Wesley.

Duce, D., Gomes, M., Hopgood, F., & Lee, J. (2012). User Interface Management and Design. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

Ma, F., Siu, S., Wong, C., & Zhong, Y. (2015). GUI design. Hong Kong: Sendpoints Publishing Co., Ltd.

Oliver, R. (2017). Advantages and Disadvantages of UML Every Developer Should Know. Retrieved 9 February 2018, from https://creately.com/blog/diagrams/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-uml/

Rouse, M. (2017). What is UIML (User Interface Markup Language)?. Retrieved 9 February 2018, from https://searchmicroservices.techtarget.com/definition/UIML-User-Interface-Markup-Language

SmartDraw. (2016). UML Diagram - Everything You Need to Know About UML Diagrams. Retrieved 9 February 2018, from https://www.smartdraw.com/uml-diagram/

Stanciulescu, A. (2008). A methodology for developing multimodal user interfaces of information systems. Louvain-la-Neuve: UCL.

Tavangarian, D. (2009). Intelligent Interactive Assistance and Mobile Multimedia Computing. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Visual. (2016). What is Unified Modeling Language (UML)?. Retrieved 9 February 2018, from https://www.visual-paradigm.com/guide/uml-unified-modeling-language/what-is-uml/