research-article

Why is the web loosely coupled?: a multi-faceted metric for service design

Authors:

Cesare Pautasso,

Erik WildeAuthors Info & Claims

WWW '09: Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web

Pages 911 - 920

https://doi.org/10.1145/1526709.1526832

Published: 20 April 2009 Publication History

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.

References

[1]

Tim Berners-Lee, Roy Thomas Fielding, and Larry Masinter. Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax. Internet RFC 3986, January 2005.

[2]

Andrew Birrell and Bruce Jay Nelson. Implementing Remote Procedure Calls. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), 2:39--59, February 1984.

Digital Library

[3]

Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer, editors. Service Orient or Be Doomed! John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY, March 2006.

[4]

Tim Bray, Jean Paoli, C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Eve Maler, and Francois Yergeau. Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth Edition). World Wide Web Consortium, Recommendation REC-xml-20081126, November 2008.

[5]

Lionel C. Briand, John W. Daly, and Jurgen K. Wust. A Unified Framework for Coupling Measurement in Object-Oriented Systems. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 25(1):91--121, January 1999.

Digital Library

[6]

David Chappell. Enterprise Service Bus. O'Reilly, 2004.

Digital Library

[7]

Luc Clement, Andrew Hately, Claus von Riegen, and Tony Rogers. UDDI Version 3.0.2. Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, UDDI Spec Technical Committee Draft, October 2004.

[8]

Xin Dong, Alon Y. Halevy, Jayant Madhavan, Ema Nemes, and Jun Zhang. Similarity Search for Web Services. In Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, pages 372--383, Toronto, Canada, September 2004.

Digital Library

[9]

Thomas Erl. Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design. Prentice Hall, 2005.

Digital Library

[10]

Patrick Th. Eugster, Pascal A. Felber, Rachid Guerraoui, and Anne-Marie Kermarrec. The many faces of publish/subscribe. ACM Computing Surveys, 35(2):114--131, 2003.

Digital Library

[11]

Gunar Fiedler, Thomas Raak, and Bernhard Thalheim. Database Collaboration Instead of Integration. In Sven Hartmann and Markus Stumptner, editors, Proceedings of the 2nd Asia-Pacific Conference on Conceptual Modelling, pages 49--58, Newcastle, Australia, January 2005.

Digital Library

[12]

Roy Thomas Fielding. Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures. PhD thesis, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California, 2000.

Digital Library

[13]

Roy Thomas Fielding, Jim Gettys, Jeffrey C. Mogul, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen, Larry Masinter, Paul J. Leach, and Tim Berners-Lee. Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1. Internet RFC 2616, June 1999.

[14]

Roy Thomas Fielding and Richard N. Taylor. Principled Design of the Modern Web Architecture. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, 2(2):115--150, May 2002.

Digital Library

[15]

Carlo Ghezzi, Mehdi Jazayeri, and Dino Mandrioli. Fundamentals of Software Engineering. Prentice Hall, 2003.

Digital Library

[16]

Joe Gregorio. URI Template. Internet Draft draft-gregorio-uritemplate-03, March 2008.

[17]

Michi Henning. API Design Matters. ACM Queue, 5(4):24--36, May 2007.

Digital Library

[18]

Gregor Hohpe. Enterprise Integration Patterns. Addison-Wesley, October 2003.

Digital Library

[19]

Nicolai M. Josuttis. SOA In Practice. O'Reilly, August 2007.

Digital Library

[20]

Doug Kaye. Loosely Coupled: The Missing Pieces of Web Services. RDS Press, August 2003.

Digital Library

[21]

Tim Kindberg. Ubiquitous and contextual identifier resolution for the real-world wide web. Technical Report 95, HP Labs, 2001.

[22]

Tim Kindberg and Sandro Hawke. The 'tag' URI Scheme. Internet RFC 4151, October 2005.

[23]

Dirk Krafzig, Karl Banke, and Dirk Slama. Enterprise SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices (The Coad Series). Prentice Hall, 2004.

Digital Library

[24]

David M. Kristol and Lou Montulli. HTTP State Management Mechanism. Internet RFC 2965, October 2000.

Digital Library

[25]

Michele Lanza and Radu Marinescu. Object-Oriented Metrics in Practice. Springer, 2006.

Digital Library

[26]

G. J. Myers. Composite/Structured Design. Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1978.

Digital Library

[27]

Eric Newcomer and Greg Lomow. Understanding SOA with Web services. Addison-Wesley, 2005.

Digital Library

[28]

Johann Oberleitner, Thomas Gschwind, and Mehdi Jazayeri. The Vienna Component Framework enabling composition across component models. In ICSE '03: Proc. of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 25--35, 2003.

Digital Library

[29]

J. Douglas Orton and Karl E. Weick. Loosely Coupled Systems: A Reconceptualization. Academy of Management Review, 15(2):203--223, April 1990.

[30]

Cesare Pautasso and Gustavo Alonso. Flexible Binding for Reusable Composition of Web Services. In Proc. of the 4th Workshop on Software Composition (SC 2005), Edinburgh, Scotland, April 2005.

Digital Library

[31]

Cesare Pautasso, Olaf Zimmermann, and Frank Leymann. RESTful Web Services vs. "Big" Web Services: Making the Right Architectural Decision. In Proceedings of the 17th International World Wide Web Conference, pages 805--814, Beijing, China, April 2008. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[32]

Cynthia Rettig. The Trouble with Enterprise Software. MIT Sloan Management Review, 49(1):21--27, 2007.

[33]

Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby. RESTful Web Services. O'Reilly, May 2007.

Digital Library

[34]

Jos A. Rijpma. Complexity, Tight-Coupling and Reliability: Connecting Normal Accidents Theory and High Reliability Theory. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 5(1), March 1997.

[35]

Wayne P. Stevens, Glenford J. Myers, and Larry L. Constantine. Structured Design. IBM Systems Journal, 13(2):115--139, 1974.

Digital Library

[36]

Andrew S. Tanenbaum. Distributed Operating Systems. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, September 1994.

[37]

James D. Thompson. Organizations in Action: Social Science Bases of Administrative Theory. McGraw-Hill, New York, NY, June 1967.

[38]

Manolis Tzagarakis, Nikos Karousos, Dimitris Christodoulakis, and Siegfried Reich. Naming as a Fundamental Concept of Open Hypermedia Systems. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, pages 103--112, San Antonio, Texas, May 2000. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[39]

Steve Vinoski. Old Measures for New Services. IEEE Internet Computing, 9(6):72--74, November 2005.

Digital Library

[40]

Steve Vinoski. Serendipitous Reuse. IEEE Internet Computing, 12(1):84--87, January 2008.

Digital Library

[41]

Sanjiva Weerawarana, Francisco Curbera, Frank Leymann, Tony Storey, and Donald Ferguson. Web Services Platform Architecture. Prentice Hall, March 2005.

Digital Library

[42]

Karl E. Weick. Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21(1):1--19, March 1976.

[43]

Erik Wilde and Robert J. Glushko. Document Design Matters. Communications of the ACM, 51(10):43--49, October 2008.

Digital Library

[44]

Dan Woods and Thomas Mattern. Enterprise SOA: Designing IT for Business Innovation. O'Reilly, 2006.

Digital Library

[45]

E. Yourdon and L. Constantine. Structural Design. Prentice Hall, 1979.

[46]

Hubert Zimmermann. OSI Reference Model -- The ISO Model of Architecture for Open Systems Interconnection. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 28(4):425--432, April 1980.

[47]

Olaf Zimmermann, Mark Tomlinson, and Stefan Peuser. Perspectives on Web Services: Applying SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI to Real-World Projects. Springer, September 2003.

Digital Library

Cited By

Stüber MFrey G(2024)Dynamic system models and their simulation in the Semantic WebSemantic Web10.3233/SW-23335915:2(353-388)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.3233/SW-233359
Zdun UQueval PSimhandl GScandariato RChakravarty SJelić MJovanović A(2024)Detection Strategies for Microservice Security TacticsIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2023.327648721:3(1257-1273)Online publication date: May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2023.3276487
Erdei RDelinschi DMatei OAndreica L(2024)Good practices in designing a communication channel architecture for secure async flexible distributed collaborationLogic Journal of the IGPL10.1093/jigpal/jzae01232:2(334-351)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1093/jigpal/jzae012
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Why is the web loosely coupled?: a multi-faceted metric for service design
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management

Recommendations

Restful web services vs. "big"' web services: making the right architectural decision
WWW '08: Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web

Recent technology trends in the Web Services (WS) domain indicate that a solution eliminating the presumed complexity of the WS-* standards may be in sight: advocates of REpresentational State Transfer (REST) have come to believe that their ideas ...
Defining Metrics for Loose Coupling Evaluation in Service Composition
SCC '10: Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) mainly rely on the service composition mechanism which supports the reusability. Numerous researches focus on this thematic in order to satisfy all the objectives of quality fixed by the SOA community. One of these ...
Specifying loose coupling from existing service composition approaches
ECSA'10: Proceedings of the 4th European conference on Software architecture

The loose coupling notion associated with the service composition is a key concept which defines the Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) paradigm. Given that this notion is intuitively understood, its definition lacks formalism. Moreover, the existing ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

WWW '09: Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web

April 2009

1280 pages

ISBN:9781605584874

DOI:10.1145/1526709

General Chairs:
Juan Quemada
DIT-UPM
,
Gonzalo León
DIT-UPM
,
Program Chairs:
Yoelle Maarek
Google Inc., Israel
,
Wolfgang Nejdl
L3S and Hannover University

Copyright © 2009 IW3C2 org.

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 20 April 2009

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

WWW '09

Sponsor:

WWW '09: The 18th International World Wide Web Conference

April 20 - 24, 2009

Madrid, Spain

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

105
Total Citations
View Citations
1,528
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)28
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3

Reflects downloads up to 26 Sep 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Stüber MFrey G(2024)Dynamic system models and their simulation in the Semantic WebSemantic Web10.3233/SW-23335915:2(353-388)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.3233/SW-233359
Zdun UQueval PSimhandl GScandariato RChakravarty SJelić MJovanović A(2024)Detection Strategies for Microservice Security TacticsIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2023.327648721:3(1257-1273)Online publication date: May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2023.3276487
Erdei RDelinschi DMatei OAndreica L(2024)Good practices in designing a communication channel architecture for secure async flexible distributed collaborationLogic Journal of the IGPL10.1093/jigpal/jzae01232:2(334-351)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1093/jigpal/jzae012
Sharma KRahul (2024)Vehicle Registration Using Blockchain and JSON Web Token for Authentication on RESTful Web Service from India PerspectiveSoft Computing and Signal Processing10.1007/978-981-99-8628-6_8(83-92)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8628-6_8
Fuady MWidiyaningtyas THerwanto HTaroreh D(2023)Loosely Coupled Approach on Web-Based Item Analysis2023 8th International Conference on Electrical, Electronics and Information Engineering (ICEEIE)10.1109/ICEEIE59078.2023.10334757(1-4)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICEEIE59078.2023.10334757
Chaparadza RChaoub AChng BDavis NDutta AElkotob MKrishnaswamy DMahdi KMämmelä AMartinez-Julia PNarang NOng LPatwary MSimsek MVoigt JPolk CMcDonnell KNiemöller JMilham DCadman J(2023)System Optimization2023 IEEE Future Networks World Forum (FNWF)10.1109/FNWF58287.2023.10520436(1-89)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/FNWF58287.2023.10520436
D'Agati LBenomar ZLongo FMerlino GPuliafito A(2023)Cloud-based Web of Things: A Telemedicine Use Case2023 IEEE 20th Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC)10.1109/CCNC51644.2023.10060344(1-6)Online publication date: 8-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/CCNC51644.2023.10060344
Mämmelä ARiekki JKiviranta M(2023)Loose Coupling: An Invisible Thread in the History of TechnologyIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.328468511(59456-59482)Online publication date: 2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3284685
Koçi RFranch XJovanovic PAbelló A(2023)Web API evolution patterns: A usage-driven approachJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111609198(111609)Online publication date: Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2023.111609
Benomar ZLongo FMerlino GPuliafito A(2022)A Cloud-Based and Dynamic DNS Approach to Enable the Web of ThingsIEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering10.1109/TNSE.2021.31100039:6(3968-3978)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSE.2021.3110003
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents