While there are sophisticated development environments and tools
for building Java applications, including some good visual tools
(IBM's VisualAge comes to mind), most of them are geared toward
specific tasks in the development process, usually writing code.
For most Java developers, there's no inherent connection between
designing software systems and writing code. I-Logix's Rhapsody
changes the developer's point of view from writing code, or
assembling software components, to modeling the system to be
built. The design methodology it incorporates is the Unified
Modeling Language (UML). UML is based on OMT, Booch, OOSE, and
other earlier modeling techniques that by themselves only
modeled a single aspect of the system. UML diagrams are able to
represent unambiguously all aspects of the system being built.
Rhapsody is unique in that it builds Java applications visually
but not in the same sense as VisualAge or Visual Café. Instead
it uses a type of visual programming that translates detailed,
formal graphical