通用PHP服务器应用程序的UML部署图

Question

Lets assume you want to visualize a common PHP server application using the UML 2 deployment diagram for someone not having much knowledge in this area. Such a common application could have three device nodes (Database Server, Web Server and Client) and four execution environment nodes (Relational Database Management System, Web Server, PHP Interpreter and a Web Browser). And inside "PHP Interpreter" might be sitting a common component "Application" and inside the execution environment "Web Browser" might be three artifacts (HTML, CSS and JavaScript).

Since PHP supports many different protocols and RDBMS, a common specifier for the communication between the "PHP Interpreter" Node and the "Relational Database Management System" node can't be labeled with a concrete protocol, so we could mostly say it's TCP/IP between the underlaying device nodes "Database Server" and "Web Server"; but event this is not always true (think about sockets). Between the execution environment nodes "Web Server" and "Web Browser" it's HTTP. What is great! :D. Regarding the communication between the RDBMS and the Application component it's SQL, but this is not a protocol and the result interface depends on the underlining driver. Also it's not given that the three device nodes on separate instances. And what about the ports and interfaces of the component "Application" regarding the Web Browser. Can we specify here something more specific which is also mostly true?

So my question is, how would a correct and generically well balanced diagram could look like considering my notes in the paragraph before?

Answer 1

What you can do is to create some overview diagram which lights up a mix of the above like this one:

You can see that the machine itself has an IP connection which of course can carry lots of protocols. You don't necessarily show what will travel across this IP connection. If needed you would create another diagram which lists all the supported protocols as interfaces being realized here. That might get messy/tricky to show and there are quite some obvious things which can easily be discarded.

Further you can see that you have a RDBMS and a Web Server which run in separate jails. Here you can see that they provide ports for what they are used to talk to. It's again not shown here whom and how they talk to. This can again go into another diagram like this:

Long story short: you will not create a single diagram showing everything inside, but you will create different diagrams for different aspects - which you reach from some overview diagram.