This book presents a set of principles for designing frameworks and practical techniques for adapting them efficiently. It also describes how UML may be used to model frameworks and their applications and proposes a set of extensions to the UML which apply specifically to framework design.

The aim of the UML profile for framework architectures is the definition of a UML subset, enriched with a few UML-compliant extensions, which allows the annotation of such artefacts. Thus, the resulting profile that we call UML-F does not correspond to a specific domain, but to framework technology. Though profiles might be standardized in the future, sound proposals from various communities will get the process of defining and standardizing UML profiles started. In that sense, this book sets the stage for the UML profile for framework architectures.