Question

Day in and day out, you probably depend on many different sorts of complex technological tools and innovations. Luckily, the modern world has embraced some sense of user-focused design in many of its products, so you should not need an engineering degree to operate a microwave oven or create a spreadsheet on your laptop. The most popular technology “just works” and does not require you to toil over hundreds of densely-packed pages of a user manual. Imagine sitting comfortably at home. You call a friend on your cell phone. A lot of technology is at work behind the scenes in those few seconds before your friend answers. This hidden machinery allows you and your friend to speak nearly instantly—no matter where either of you are on the planet. You—and most cell phone users—can remain blissfully unaware of everything that happens to process a mobile call. Similarly, programmers need not know the ins and outs of every single method or class they use. For example, you have used the String class in this course but understand only how to create a String and how to perform various operations on that String object. You have not had to concern yourself with the details of how the String keeps track of the characters in the string, the ordering of those characters, or the efficient processing of the collection of characters. Just like the cell phone user, you are likely most familiar with the interface of the tool rather than its inner workings. If you found another Java class that allowed you to manage strings of characters, you could adopt it quickly, much like you could change cell phone carriers. You count on your tools to make your job easier—and you are not sweating the details. When you adopt classes from another user or library, and you are completely oblivious to what is happening “behind the scenes,” you are definitely working with a loosely-coupled program. Users of such programs often remark, “I am not sure how it works but it works.” They do not need to tear the code of the application apart and learn how it accomplishes its task, and this is ideal. A loosely-coupled program does not depend on a specific context to run correctly. These applications can be swapped without affecting a program; they are wholly self-contained and can easily be scooped out of an application without leaving carnage in their wakes. By Day 3, think about a real-life process or activity that exemplifies loose coupling, and explain your answer based on this week’s reading. Describe how the process or activity could easily be replaced without affecting your daily life.

Answer 1

loosely coupled system is one in which each of its components has, or makes use of, little or no knowledge of the definitions of other separate components.

In loosely coupled system outcomes matters more than process. As long as the outcome is achieved, the process not matters.

For Ex. for an online social network website, database storage is very important and website has many alternatives for saving data. It can use SQL based databases like MySQL or No-SQL type database like MongoDB and they might have different performances but the target of database saving is fulfilled. Similarly, there are many activities in our daily life which can be completed in many ways, with their own perks and cons. Some of are given below:

Transport: We need transport services to go from one place to another and here the main requirement is to reach the destination at the time. No matter what transport service is chosen. We can walk to the destination or can take a ride using Uber. We can use public transport services like the metro or city bus. We can also buy our own vehicle, But no matter what method is chosen, as long as we reach the destination at the time.

Shopping: We need to purchase so many things daily, like groceries, clothes, vegetables, etc. We can purchase groceries by going to the local grocery shop. Or we can go to market and buy all items. Or we can go to a big mall and buy all the things at once. Or we can avoid all hassle and buy all things online sitting on a comfy sofa. But the main target is to purchase items and this will be achieved in all scenarios.

There are many more activities which can be replaced like jogging, in a park or ground or synthetic track or treadmill.

We can even replace the whole activity instead of the process.
For Ex. instead of jogging, we can choose running or we can also choose Yoga for other benefits of health.
We can buy a laptop instead of a PC. And so many other things, activities, processes which can be replaced.