CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2011/ch4 4h as

Singleton Pattern

In software engineering the singleton pattern is a creational pattern which is used to ensure that not more than one object is ever created for a class. The singleton also provides a point of global access. There may be various reasons that necessitate such a requirement for a class.

Common Applications

The class may represent the global state of the system or the class may correspond to a master logger which writes into the log file. Some other places where the singleton pattern is applicable are device drivers, registry settings, etc.

Implementation

There are many ways of implementing the singleton pattern. The most common way is to have a method which creates an instance of the object if it does not already exist. Otherwise the existing reference is returned. To make sure that multiple instances are not created the constructor is made private. Also the object which stores the single instance is made a class variable and is thus not tied to any particular instance of the class.

public class Singleton {
    private static Singleton singletonInstance;
    private Singleton() {  }
    public static Singleton getInstance() {
            if (singletonInstance == null) {
                   singletonInstance = new Singleton();
            }
            return singletonInstance;
    }
}

This is an example of lazy instantiation where the object is not created until the first time it is required. Though the above implementation is straight forward, it does not work in a multi threaded environment. If two threads call the getInstance method at the same time, race conditions may result in more than one instance of the class being created, violating the singleton pattern. This problem can be easily solved by making the 'getInstance' method mutually exclusive using locks. In JAVA this is easily achieved by making the 'getInstance' method synchronized.

Alternatively we could replace

    private static Singleton singletonInstance; 	          

with

    private static Singleton singletonInstance = new Singleton();

This is an example of eager instantiation and it has a pitfall of wasting memory space if the Singleton object never ends up being used. However it should also be noted that this version is thread safe because the singletonInstance is created as soon as the Singleton class is loaded by the class loader.

The above examples present a very common way of implementing the singleton pattern. This is by means an exhaustive list of possible implementations. There are additional methods of achieving the same result such as “double checked locking” and using enum data-type