"Designing Concurrent, Distributed, and Real-Time Applications with UML" (Addison-Wesley; ISBN 0-201-65793-7) by Hassan Gomaa is a book that I wish was out two years ago. Back then I was on a project that had real-time requirements, but was being developed (against my recommendation) for Windows NT. Also, we were using standard Java. Somehow, the team and I managed to crank out a product which worked, but I knew that there had to be a better way to approach this kind of software. The bad news is that now that this book on the topic is available, I have made a career choice which is taking me away from this kind of work.

This book is centered around a methodology called COMET. You can think of COMET as a version of the Unified Process that is geared around concurrent and real-time applications. The good news is that if you know the Unified Process then you only need to make some relatively small changes to use COMET instead.

The first part of the book is background material. It covers the basics of UML, concurrent programming, technologies that are availble, and methodologies.

The second part of the book explains COMET and how to use it with UML notation. It goes through all the usual type of modeling aspects, such as use cases, class design, etc. This section ends with a chapter on performance analysis, which is critical in real-time development.

The third and final part of the book goes through five completely different case studies. In a couple of these case studies, I wondered if COMET might be overkill.

I recommend this book to anyone working on real-time applications, such as telecom switches. The book has a lot of excellent ideas. I only wish it had been out a couple years ago when I really needed it.