Deployment Diagram

Identifying deployment elements in the Courseware Management System

Since components of the Courseware Management System will be the primary elements represented in the deployment diagram, we will add the components from the component diagram (discussed in the previous article) to the deployment diagram. These components are:

View Controller Model Database Access

The next step is to identify the deployment environment for the Courseware Management System. A good deployment environment is normally well partitioned to ensure that the application components have proper resources in their execution environment. Hence, we will define the nodes of our deployment environment as follows:

Web ServerThis node represents the Web server that will receive user requests and send responses from the application. Application ServerThe application server node that will process user requests from the Web server and send application responses back to the Web server is represented by this node. The application server node will host the different components of the Courseware Management System, such as View, Controller, Model, and Database Access. Database ServerThe database server node will host the database server used by the components in the application server node to store and retrieve the data used by the Courseware Management System.

Notice that the nodes that we have listed above were not referred at all until this point in the article series. This is because these are implementation level detailsexactly the stuff you should avoid considering when you work on the design of the application. The different modeling diagrams that make up your application design must not have any dependencies on or references to the deployment environment. These extra implementation elements that we have introduced are standard for a multi-tier Web application architecture. Let us see how this is so. If, for example, the same Courseware Management System application were to deployed on, say, a deployment environment consisting of, say, Apache Web Server, BEA WebLogic application server, and Oracle database server, the deployment diagram would hold true. Now, if we want to replace BEA WebLogic application server with, say,

IBM Websphere, neither the UML models (static and dynamic) nor the deployment diagram will change. On the other hand, if we now wanted to make this a client/server application, the changes will be required only to the deployment diagram by removing the Web server node and changing the deployment environment to something more suited for a client/server software environment. The components that run in this deployment environment will have none to minimal changes. This in effect demonstrates the clean separation of deployment diagram from the other UML diagrams and demonstrates the robustness of the application's design. Now that we have an idea of the nodes that will make up the deployment diagram and the components in each of these nodes, we are ready to draw the deployment diagram using our UML modeling tool.

Deployment Diagram

Figure Deployment diagram for the Courseware Management System Figure shows the Deployment diagram for the Courseware Management System. The deployment diagram shows the three nodes PRD_WEB_SERVER, PRD_APP_SERVER, and PRD_DB_SERVER that represent the nodes for the Web server, application server, and database server, respectively. The View, Controller, and Model components are depicted in the application server node and the three nodes are interconnected to denote association between them in the Courseware Management System.