Prof. Dr. Cesare Pautasso

Why is the Web Loosely Coupled? A Multi-Faceted Metric for Service Design

Cesare Pautasso, Erik Wilde

18th World Wide Web Conference (WWW2009), Madrid, Spain, pp. 911-920

April 2009

Abstract

Loose coupling is often quoted as a desirable property of systems architectures. One of the main goals of building systems using Web technologies is to achieve loose coupling. However, given the lack of a widely accepted definition of this term, it becomes hard to use coupling as a criterion to evaluate alternative Web technology choices, as all options may exhibit, and claim to provide, some kind of "loose" coupling effects. This paper presents a systematic study of the degree of coupling found in service-oriented systems based on a multi-faceted approach. Thanks to the metric introduced in this paper, coupling is no longer a one-dimensional concept with loose coupling found somewhere in between tight coupling and no coupling. The paper shows how the metric can be applied to real-world examples in order to support and improve the design process of service-oriented systems.

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DOI: 10.1145/1526709.1526832

PDF: ▼restws-www2009.pdf (274KB)

Citation

Bibtex

@inproceedings{restws:2009:www,
	author = {Cesare Pautasso and Erik Wilde},
	title = {Why is the Web Loosely Coupled?  A Multi-Faceted Metric for Service Design},
	booktitle = {18th World Wide Web Conference (WWW2009)},
	year = {2009},
	month = {April},
	pages = {911-920},
	publisher = {ACM},
	address = {Madrid, Spain},
	abstract = {Loose coupling is often quoted as a desirable property of systems architectures. One of the main goals of building systems using Web technologies is to achieve loose coupling. However, given the lack of a widely accepted definition of this term, it becomes hard to use coupling as a criterion to evaluate alternative Web technology choices, as all options may exhibit, and claim to provide, some kind of "loose" coupling effects. This paper presents a systematic study of the degree of coupling found in service-oriented systems based on a multi-faceted approach. Thanks to the metric introduced in this paper, coupling is no longer a one-dimensional concept with loose coupling found somewhere in between tight coupling and no coupling. The paper shows how the metric can be applied to real-world examples in order to support and improve the design process of service-oriented systems.},
	keywords = {coupling, REST},
	doi = {10.1145/1526709.1526832}
}