Wiring Diagrams
When you develop an EBA, most of the exchanges between the parts are based on notifications. Keep in mind that notifications can be exchanged between parts that don't reference each other. If you used a class diagram to describe this system, it would tell you little about how the system works, because there would be few or no associations between the classes. You would essentially end up with a diagram just listing all the classes, with no lines connecting them. A better way to document EBAs is to use "Signal Wiring Diagrams" (usually just called "Wiring Diagrams") which show who sends signals (notifications) to whom. I developed wiring diagrams several years ago to better model EBAs; see Figure 2.
The large boxes in Figure 2 denote objects. The names in the boxes show the object types. The small black boxes on the object borders are pins. Pins are the inputs and outputs of an object, in terms of notification signals. Each signal has arrows to denote the direction of flow. A small label above the signal line indicates the name of the notification. In Figure 2, the signal Print is sent from PrintManager to DocumentPrinter. Input pins can also contain the name of the method they connect to. You may have noticed that there are no interfaces shown in the diagram. When notifications are sent using untyped calls, interfaces are not involved. PrintManager doesn't know anything about the DocumentPrinter type. Indeed, PrintManager need not even know that DocumentPrinter is handling its Print notifications.
When notifications are sent using typed calls, interfaces are involved. In such cases, the interfaces are shown as gray boxes enclosing the pins that are associated with the interface methods; see Figure 3.
Signal wiring diagrams get their name because they look like hardware circuit diagrams used by electrical engineers. Software objects look like integrated circuits, with input and output pins. Notifications appear as interconnection wires. From a systems perspective, both hardware diagrams and signal wiring diagrams are representations of systems composed by parts wired together. Whether the boxes are implemented with hardware or software matters little, conceptually. The software objects might be replaced by hardware equivalents, with minimal changes to the overall diagram. Figure 4 shows the complete wiring diagram of SystemBrowser, a program I present in this article.
You can find a Visio stencil for wiring diagrams online (see www.ddj.com/code/ and www.faisoncomputing.com/samples/ EventBasedProgramming/VisioSignalWiringDiagramStencil.zip).
