Cohesion and Decoupling, what do they represent?

Question

What are Cohesion and Decoupling? I found information about coupling but not about decoupling.

Answer 1

That article from Aaron is very good for understanding, also I'd recommend that you read manning publications Spring in Action book, they give very good examples on how the spring solves that problem it will definitely improve your understanding of this.

EDIT :

I came accross this in this great book called Growing object oriented software guided by tests :

Coupling :

Elements are coupled if a change in one forces a change in the other. For example, if two classes inherit from a common parent, then a change in one class might require a change in the other. Think of a combo audio system: It’s tightly coupled because if we want to change from analog to digital radio, we must rebuild the whole system. If we assemble a system from separates, it would have low coupling and we could just swap out the receiver. “Loosely” coupled features (i.e., those with low coupling) are easier to maintain.

Cohesion:

An element’s cohesion is a measure of whether its responsibilities form a meaningful unit. For example, a class that parses both dates and URLs is not coherent, because they’re unrelated concepts. Think of a machine that washes both clothes and dishes—it’s unlikely to do both well.2 At the other extreme, a class that parses only the punctuation in a URL is unlikely to be coherent, because it doesn’t represent a whole concept. To get anything done, the programmer will have to find other parsers for protocol, host, resource, and so on. Features with “high” coherence are easier to maintain.