http://www2009.eprints.org/92/ Why is the Web Loosely Coupled? A Multi-Faceted Metric for Service Design Pautasso, Cesare Wilde, Erik 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. 2009-04 Conference or Workshop Item PeerReviewed application/pdf http://www2009.eprints.org/92/1/p911.pdf text/html http://www2009.eprints.org/92/2/index.html application/pdf http://www2009.eprints.org/92/3/loosely-coupled-www2009.pdf http://dret.net/netdret/docs/loosely-coupled-www2009/ Pautasso, Cesare <http://www2009.eprints.org/view/author/Pautasso=3ACesare=3A=3A.html> and Wilde, Erik <http://www2009.eprints.org/view/author/Wilde=3AErik=3A=3A.html> (2009) Why is the Web Loosely Coupled? A Multi-Faceted Metric for Service Design. In: 18th International World Wide Web Conference, April 20th-24th, 2009, Madrid, Spain. http://www2009.eprints.org/92/http://www2009.eprints.org/92/1/http://www2009.eprints.org/92/2/http://www2009.eprints.org/92/3/