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

Having not programmed in an intensely object-oriented environment (e.g. Java), I'm not completely up on the intricacies of the discussion. But I have implemented a singleton in PHP 4. I did it as a way of creating a 'black-box' database handler that automatically initialized and didn't have to be passed up and down function calls in an incomplete and somewhat broken framework.

Having read some links of singleton patterns, I'm not completely sure I would implement it in quite the same way again. What was really needed was multiple objects with shared storage (e.g. the actual database handle) and this is pretty much what my call turned into.

Like most patterns and algorithms, using a singleton 'just because it's cool' is The Wrong Thing To Do. I needed a truly 'black-box' call that happened to look a lot like a singleton. And IMO that's the way to tackle the question: be aware of the pattern, but also look at it's wider scope and at what level it's instance needs to be unique.