Tight coupling between modules is a bad idea, and the worst form of coupling is cyclic dependencies between modules. Fortunately, there are a few techniques we can use to break the cycles. They are Callback, Escalation, and Demotion, and I’m going to walk through some examples that show each of them in action.

Then, once the dependencies are broken, we’ll look at two more techniques that allow us to invert and eliminate the relationship altogether. The code for each of the samples can be found in the edcie project on my Google code repository. Each example includes a build script and a simple test case. To execute them though, you’ll need GraphViz if you want to use JarAnalyzer. To invoke the build scripts without invoking JarAnalyzer, you can simply type: