Object Orientation
Using a piece of paper, a whiteboard or as here a pen and tablet can be effective to sketch your designs. Using a notation roughly similar to UML (Unified Modeling Language) can help in communicating your design to others. Usually you do not need a tool21 — unless you really want to or work in a large administrative setting. You can find a quick reference to UML notation via web search. The most useful diagram is the interaction or sequence diagram. Use it to specify how objects talk to each other — especially in distributed systems. The class diagram shown above presents a static view of the system so it is mostly for initial designs. Most of the time, when you are designing an interface, you will soon find some limitations and problems in whatever you came up with, and change it. To prevent wasting your time, it is advisable to document your interfaces only after they have been used in a few real situations and proven themselves to be practical. — Of course, this might make it tempting to forget about documentation altogether. Personally, I treat writing documentation as a ‘finishing touch’ to add to a system. When it feels ready, 21
A few integrated development environments automatically generate diagrams as you are writing your code, for example Visual Studio Ultimate, but it is neither cheap nor compatible with CoffeeScript.
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