Saturday, December 13, 2014

Java Singleton Design Pattern Best Practices with Examples

Singleton is one of the Gangs of Four Design patterns and comes in the Creational Design Pattern category. Here we will learn about Singleton design pattern principles, different ways to implement Singleton and some of the best practices for its usage.

Singleton Pattern

Singleton pattern restricts the instantiation of a class and ensures that only one instance of the class exists in the java virtual machine. The singleton class must provide a global access point to get the instance of the class. Singleton pattern is used for logging, driver’s objects, and caching and thread pool.
Singleton design pattern is also used in other design patterns like Abstract Factory, Builder, Prototype, Façade etc. Singleton design pattern is used in core java classes also, for example java.lang.Runtime, java.awt.Desktop.

Java Singleton Pattern

To implement Singleton pattern, we have different approaches but all of them have following common concepts.
·         Private constructor to restrict instantiation of the class from other classes.
·         Private static variable of the same class that is the only instance of the class.
·         Public static method that returns the instance of the class, this is the global access point for outer world to get the instance of the singleton class.

Different approaches of Singleton pattern implementation and design concerns with the implementation.

1.      Eager initialization
2.      Static block initialization
3.      Lazy Initialization
4.      Thread Safe Singleton
5.      Bill Pugh Singleton Implementation
6.      Using Reflection to destroy Singleton Pattern
7.      Enum Singleton
8.      Serialization and Singleton

Eager Initialization
In eager initialization, the instance of Singleton Class is created at the time of class loading, this is the easiest method to create a singleton class but it has a drawback that instance is created even though client application might not be using it.
Here is the implementation of static initialization singleton class.
                                                                 EagerInitializedSingleton.java
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package com.journaldev.singleton;

public class EagerInitializedSingleton {
     
    private static final EagerInitializedSingleton instance = new EagerInitializedSingleton();
     
    //private constructor to avoid client applications to use constructor
    private EagerInitializedSingleton(){}

    public static EagerInitializedSingleton getInstance(){
        return instance;
    }
}

Static block initialization

Static block initialization implementation is similar to eager initialization, except that instance of class is created in the static block that provides option for exception handling.
                                                                         StaticBlockSingleton.java
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package com.journaldev.singleton;

public class StaticBlockSingleton {

    private static StaticBlockSingleton instance;
     
    private StaticBlockSingleton(){}
     
    //static block initialization for exception handling
    static{
        try{
            instance = new StaticBlockSingleton();
        }catch(Exception e){
            throw new RuntimeException("Exception occured in creating
            singleton instance");
        }
    }
     
    public static StaticBlockSingleton getInstance(){
        return instance;
    }
}
Both eager initialization and static block initialization creates the instance even before it’s being used and that is not the best practice to use. So in further sections, we will learn how to create Singleton class that supports lazy initialization.

Lazy Initialization

Lazy initialization method to implement Singleton pattern creates the instance in the global access method. Here is the sample code for creating Singleton class with this approach.
                                                              LazyInitializedSingleton.java
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package com.journaldev.singleton;

public class LazyInitializedSingleton {

    private static LazyInitializedSingleton instance;
     
    private LazyInitializedSingleton(){}
     
    public static LazyInitializedSingleton getInstance(){
        if(instance == null){
            instance = new LazyInitializedSingleton();
        }
        return instance;
    }
}
The above implementation works fine incase of single threaded environment but when it comes to multithreaded systems, it can cause issues if multiple threads are inside the if loop at the same time. It will destroy the singleton pattern and both threads will get the different instances of singleton class. In next section, we will see different ways to create a thread-safe singleton class.

Thread Safe Singleton

The easier way to create a thread-safe singleton class is to make the global access method synchronized, so that only one thread can execute this method at a time. General implementation of this approach is like the below class.

ThreadSafeSingleton.java
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package com.journaldev.singleton;

public class ThreadSafeSingleton {

    private static ThreadSafeSingleton instance;
     
    private ThreadSafeSingleton(){}
     
    public static synchronized ThreadSafeSingleton getInstance(){
        if(instance == null){
            instance = new ThreadSafeSingleton();
        }
        return instance;
    }
     
}

Bill Pugh Singleton Implementation

Prior to Java 5, java memory model had a lot of issues and above approaches used to fail in certain scenarios where too many threads try to get the instance of the Singleton class simultaneously. So Bill Pugh came up with a different approach to create the Singleton class using an inner static helper class. The Bill Pugh Singleton implementation goes like this;


BillPughSingleton.java
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package com.journaldev.singleton;

public class BillPughSingleton {

    private BillPughSingleton(){}
     
    private static class SingletonHelper{
        private static final BillPughSingleton INSTANCE = new BillPughSingleton();
    }
     
    public static BillPughSingleton getInstance(){
        return SingletonHelper.INSTANCE;
    }
}

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