I'm starting a school group project in Java, using Swing.  It's a straightforward GUI on Database desktop app.The professor gave us the code from last year's project so we could see how he does things.  My initial impression is that the code is far more complicated than it ought to be, but I imagine programmers often think this when looking at code they didn't just write.  I'm hoping to find reasons why his system is good or bad.  (I asked the professor and he said I'd see later on why it's better, which doesn't satisfy me.)Basically, to avoid any coupling between his persistable objects, models (business logic), and views, everything is done with strings.  The persistable objects that get stored in the database are hashtables of strings, and the models and views subscribe to each other, providing string keys for the events they subscribe to.  When an event is triggered, the view or model sends a string to all of its subscribers who decide what to do for that event.  For instance, in one of the views action listener methods (I believe this just sets the bicycleMakeField on the persistable object):    else if(evt.getSource() == bicycleMakeField)    {        myRegistry.updateSubscribers(BicycleMake, bicycleMakeField.getText());    }That call eventually gets to this method in the Vehicle model:public void stateChangeRequest(String key, Object value) {            ... bunch of else ifs ...    else    if (key.equals(BicycleMake) == true)    {                ... do stuff ...The professor says that this way of doing stuff is more extensible and maintainable than having the view simply call a method on a business logic object.  He says there is no coupling between the views and models because they don't know of each others' existence.  I think this is a worse kind of coupling, because the view and model have to use the same strings in order to work.  If you remove a view or model, or make a typo in a string, you get no compile errors.  It also makes the code a whole lot longer than I think it needs to be.I want to discuss this with him, but he uses his industry experience to counter any argument that I, the inexperienced student, might make.  Is there some advantage to his approach that I'm missing?  To clarify, I want to compare the above approach, with having the view be obviously coupled to the model.  For instance, you could pass the vehicle model object to the view, and then to change the make of the vehicle, do this:vehicle.make = bicycleMakeField.getText();This would reduce 15 lines of code that are currently ONLY used to set the make of the vehicle in one place, to a single readable line of code.  (And since this kind of operation is done hundreds of times throughout the app, I think it would be a big win for readability as well as safety.)UpdateMy team leader and I restructured the framework the way we wanted to do it using static typing, informed the professor, and ended up giving him a demo.  He's generous enough to let us use our framework as long as we don't ask him for help, and if we can keep the rest of our team up to speed -- which seems fair to us.
Is coupling with strings looser than with class methods?
java;coupling