@conference {restws:2009:www, 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}, organization = {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, RESTful Web service interface}, doi = {10.1145/1526709.1526832}, author = {Cesare Pautasso and Erik Wilde} }