PHP Freaks

Preface

Welcome to part 3 of this series.

There are many design theories, documented practices and paradigms. Before attempting to dive into any of those, it’s wise to have knowledge of a common way to communicate programming structures. UML provides an industry standard to do so.

There are many types of structures than can be communicated, and UML provides a standard for many of them. However in this article I will focus on one particular type of diagrams, class diagrams.

For this tutorial I recommend having a UML editor to experiment with recreating the given examples. The goal of this tutorial is to try to provide you the most commonly used toolset to start creating your own Class Diagrams. A list of editors is included in chapter 5.

This tutorial will allow you to better understand class relations, and the diagrams I will be using in the future tutorials, starting with some common Design Patterns in the next article.

Index

1. Introduction
1.1 What are class diagrams?
1.2 Class Diagrams: OOA versus OOD
2. Class Diagram Entities
2.1 Classes
2.2 Interfaces
2.3 Packages
2.4 Data types
2.5 Entity visibility
3. Relations
3.1 Associations
3.1.1 Bi-directional navigable association
3.1.1a Bi-directional association: code example
3.1.2 Uni-directional navigable association
3.1.2a Uni-directional association: code example
3.1.3 Association class
3.1.3a Association class: code example
3.2 Aggregation (aggregate association)
3.2.1 Regular aggregation
3.2.1a Aggregation: code example
3.2.2 Composite Aggregation (composition)
3.2.2a Composite Aggregation: code example
3.3 Generalizations
3.4 Dependencies
4. Stereotypes
5. In conclusion