Updated: Updated: Architecture
Architect love to dissect buzzwords and technical terms that are tossed around, often with little understanding. When discussing large system design, one term that is almost guaranteed to be tossed around is “coupling”. It’s widely agreed that excessive coupling hampers software evolution and can make systems brittle. But how much coupling is “right”, how to measure coupling in the first place, or how to effectively reduce coupling gets a lot less airtime.
It’s amazing that once you set out to shine some light on the real meaning of a popular term, you quickly run out of space. I was going to write an article about the implications of Event-Driven Architectures and coupling, essentially debunking the all-too-common slogan “Events are loosely coupled”. I soon found out that for a nuance discussion, I’d need a model for coupling first. As I was starting to write that up, I realized it needs to split into its own post, which subsequently grew to over 3,000 words.
Find the blog post on The Many Facets of Coupling over at my Enterprise Integration Patterns site.
That site has been discussing distributed system design for over 20 years and is still rendered by a combination of Apache Ant and XSLT. Some topics and technologies do pass the test of time.
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