By Martin Fowler
When this book first appeared on the shelves, the UML was in version 1.0. Much of it appeared to have stabalized and it was in the process of OMG recognition. Since then there have been a number of revisions. In this appendix I describe the significant changes that occur, and how they affect the material in this book. If you have an earlier printing of the book, this summarizes the changes so you can keep up to date. I have made changes to the book to keep up with the UML, so if you have a later printing it describes the situation as it was at that time.
Revisions in the UML
The earliest public release what came to be the UML was version 0.8 of the unified method. It was released for OOPSLA (October) 1995. It was called the “Unified Method” and was the work of Booch and Rumbaugh, as Jacobson did not join Rational until then. In 1996 they released a 0.9 and a 0.91 version that included Jacobson’s work. At this time they changed the name to the UML.
Version 1.0 of the UML was submitted to the OMG Analysis and Design Task force in Janurary 1997. It was then combined with other submissions and a single proposal for the OMG standard was made in Septemember 1997, this was called version 1.1. This was adopted by the OMG towards the end of 1997. In a fit of darkest obfustication the OMG called this standard version 1.0. So it was both OMG version 1.0 and Rational version 1.1, not to be confused with Rational 1.0. In practice everyone calls that standard version 1.1.
UML 1.1 had a number of minor visible changes from version 1.0. When the OMG adopted UML 1.1 they set up a Revision Task Force (RTF) chaired by Cris Kobryn to tidy up various loose ends with the UML. They interally released version 1.2 in July 1998. This release was internal in that 1.1 remained the official UML standard. You could think of version 1.2 as a beta release. In practice this distinction hardly mattered as the only changes in the standard were editorial: fixing typos, grammatical errors and the like.
A more significant change occurred with version 1.3, most notably affecting Use Cases and Activity Diagrams. The amigos’ user guide and reference manual were published late in 1998 with the 1.3 changes, before the official 1.3 documents were made public, which caused some confusion.
In April 1999 the RTF will submit version 1.3 to the OMG as new official standard of the UML. The OMG Analysis and Design Task Force will then take over the UML again and consider any future moves. Of course this is what I currently know, check my web site for future update information
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