Tips for Success
To help you when applying these ideas to your own e-business projects, I offer the following tips for success:
Plan for reuse; short-sighted design leads to short-term use. Many of the same principles developed over the past decade for object-oriented and component-based reuse can be applied to XML applications. New web services standards, such as WSDL and WSFL, add the behavioral interface of reusable modules, complementing the structure defined by schema information models.
Follow a consistent set of design guidelines. Whenever possible, set model-level default properties in the UML profile and avoid overriding the mappings for individual classes, attributes, and associations.
Choose UML tools that provide complete support for the XMI model interchange standard. It is often impractical or undesirable to be locked into one design tool. In particular, code-generation and reverse-engineering tools can be built around the XMI document format that leverages the strength and flexibility of general-purpose XML tools.