THE UNIFIED MODELING LANGUAGE (UML) is a language for specifying, visualising, constructing, and documenting the artifacts of software

systems, as well as for business modelling and other non-software systems.UML is a graphical notation for modelling various aspects of software systems.Object Management Group (OMG) accepted UML as an open and industry standard visual modeling language for object-oriented systems. OMG has called for information on object-oriented methodologies. The advantage of UML is can be used for modeling middleware and this is effective for modeling large and complex software systems. It also can be used to model just about any type of application, running on any type and communication of hardware, operating system, programming language, and network, in UML. UML can built upon the Microsoft Operating Framework (MOF) metamodel for object oriented modeling. Besides that, the disadvantages of UML is does not define a standard file format, meaning that each UML tool vendor stores the representation of its UML model in a proprietary format. UML also using multiples models or diagrams makes it difficult to keep them consistent with each other and the code and much code has to be added by hand. The result is that the UML model is generally limited to what the vendor provides out of the box, which is usually some form of code generation and the code will be generated once. There are several types of UML diagrams : 1. Use-case Diagram Shows actors,use-cases,and the reationships between them.

2. Class Diagram Shows relationships between classes and pertinent information about classes themselves.

3. Object Diagram Shows a configuration of objects at an instant time.

4. Interaction Diagrams Shows an interaction between a group of collaborating objects. Two types : Collaboration diagram and sequence diagram.

5. Package Diagram Shows system structure at the library/package level.

6. State Diagram Describes behaviour of instances of a class interms of states, stimuli, and transitions.

7. Activity Diagram

Very similar to a flowchart---shows actions and decision points, but with the ability to accommodate concurrency.

8. Deployment Diagram Shows configuration of hardware and software in a distributed system.