Are there any viable alternatives to the GOF Singleton Pattern?

Question

Let\'s face it. The Singleton Pattern is highly controversial topic with hordes programmers on both sides of the fence. There are those who feel like the Singleto

Answer 1

Monostate (described in Robert C. Martin's Agile Software Development) is an alternative to singleton. In this pattern the class's data are all static but the getters/setters are non-static.

For example:

public class MonoStateExample
{
    private static int x;

    public int getX()
    {
        return x;
    }

    public void setX(int xVal)
    {
        x = xVal;
    }
}

public class MonoDriver
{
    public static void main(String args[])
    {
        MonoStateExample m1 = new MonoStateExample();
        m1.setX(10);

        MonoStateExample m2 = new MonoStateExample();
        if(m1.getX() == m2.getX())
        {
            //singleton behavior
        }
    }
}

Monostate has similar behavior to singleton but does so in a way where the programmer is not necessarily aware of the fact that a singleton is being used.