Ben Chuanlong Du's Blog

It is never too late to learn.

Implement Singleton in Java

An implementation of the singleton pattern must:

  • ensure that only one instance of the singleton class ever exists;
  • and provide global access to that instance.

Typically, this is done by:

  • declaring all constructors of the class to be private;
  • and providing a static method that returns a reference to the instance.

The instance is usually stored as a private static variable; the instance is created when the variable is initialized, at some point before the static method is first called. The following is a sample implementation written in Java.