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Real time example of a singleton design pattern in Java

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In this tutorial we are going to learn about singleton design pattern in Java with real time examples.

Singleton Design Pattern in object oriented programming is a class that can have only one object i.e., single instance of a class at a time.

In terms of instantiation for a singleton class we use getInstance() method and for a normal class we use constructor.

For example, let’s say we have to define a class that has only one instance and provides global point of access to it where a class must ensure that only single instance should be created and single object can be used by all other classes.

There are two forms of singleton design pattern:

  1. Early Instantiation: creation of instance at load time.
  2. Lazy Instantiation: creation if instance when required.

Advantages and uses of singleton design pattern:

  • Saves memory because object is not created at each request where single instance is reused again and again.
  • Singleton pattern is mostly used in multi-threaded and database applications.

Sample Code Snippet:

public class Singleton {
	
	private static Singleton singleton_instance=null;
	private Singleton()
	{
		connection();
	}
	public static Singleton getInstance()
	{
		if(singleton_instance==null) {
			singleton_instance =new Singleton();
		}
		return singleton_instance;
	}
	public void connection()
	{
		System.out.println("connected to database");
	}
	public static void main(String[] args)
	{
		Singleton s1;
		s1=Singleton.getInstance();
	}
}

Output:

connected to database

As described by the pattern, any time you want there to exist only a single instance of something, you would use the Singleton Pattern.

A common example might be a Logger object. There could be many places throughout the system where one would invoke a logger to, well, log something. But you may only ever need one such instance. This can be particularly true if constructing the instance is a heavy operation.

Something like this:

public class Logger {
    private static final Logger INSTANCE = new Logger();

    private Logger() {
        // do something to initialize the logger
    }

    public static Logger getInstance() {
        return INSTANCE;
    }

    // implementation ...
}

Then any code which needs to reference the logger doesn’t need to instantiate it (can’t, in fact), and instead just uses the singleton:

Logger.getInstance().Log("some message");

Other real-world examples might include a dependency injection container, a read-only data access service (such as a lookup service which caches results), etc. Generally anything where initialization or repeated operations can be heavy and which is thread-safe.