Component Diagrams

Remember I talked about Component Diagrams yesterday during the "Marathon Blog Session" used to catch up? Well, after more investigation, I found out some things about Component Diagrams. I was almost ashamed that I never used Component Diagrams, and I thought this was an inadequacy of my skills. So, I went to the UML source (IBM Rational) and got out a couple of books related to design. After reading up on the subject, I found out why I had never implemented a Component Diagram. It turns out none of the Systems I have developed were not large enough to merit such a diagram. It turns out that Component Diagrams are used for the Design phase, but it is almost as if they abstract out the objects and group the system into components (duh). These components describe system parts that are interchangeable and replaceable. Thus, really the only part of this system that I could "componentize" (think of making components) would be the View, or Controller (both of which are now designated as packages, but could be thought of as components).