Twine it!

One of presentations that captured more buzz at the Web 2.0 Summit was Twine. Well, according to Radar Networks

Twine is unique because it understands the meaning of information and relationships and automatically helps to organize and connect related items. Using the Semantic Web, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence, Twine automatically enriches information and finds patterns that individuals cannot easily see on their own. Twine transforms any information into Semantic Web content, a richer and ultimately more useful and portable form of knowledge. Users of Twine also can locate information using powerful new patent-pending social and semantic search capabilities so that they can find exactly what they need, from people and groups they trust.

The concept seems very interesting for a computer science nerd like me. But if you also feel like taking a look you can read radar networks article or O’Reilly Radar coverage on this presentation (in this one you can see some previews of twine).

I just wished I could do this for a living.

Coupling for the Objected Oriented Aproach

For those who know nothing about coupling it’s described on the wikipedia as the degree to which each program module relies on each one of the other modules.

Doesn’t ring a bell? Well, I don’t fancy that definition as well. Others have defined it as the level of interdependency between a method and the environment. Maybe this one suits you better.

Associated with this term often comes cohesion. Cohesion relates to the number and diversity of tasks for which a single unit of an application is responsible. It is relevant for units of a single class and an individual method.

After knowing these two concepts it’s fairly easy to understand that we strive for a loosely coupled class structure where objects have high cohesion. This combination normally allows us to perform changes in classes with minimal impact on the overall solution, while creating high quality reusable components.

Just yesterday I saw something on this subject on Web 2.0 Summit – why can’t I go to the good conferences? – coverage on O’Reilly Radar. There I found this image that was taken from Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies – no, I don’t think you’ll find this one in the library – that correctly reflects this reality.

So if all of this is so straightforward why am I talking about it? Well as of today I found someone that believes that all of this is wrong. I tried to google it to see if I found such theory but I was unable to. Tight coupling in a complex system!? Ideas anyone?

To finish, and for those of you who are not satisfied with the style (I call it short-and-bad) of this little introduction – or if you just want to learn a little more – you can read chapter 7 of Objects First With Java by D. Barnes and M. Kölling. In my opinion this is simply the best books for OOP beginner. And if you like the book and you want to read the rest of it you have two choices:

1. Buy it
2. Get it from you Library (uminho students click here)