On design patterns: When should I use the singleton?

Question

The glorified global variable - becomes a gloried global class. Some say breaking object-oriented design.

Give me scenarios, other than the good old logger where it

Answer 1

A Singleton candidate must satisfy three requirements:

• controls concurrent access to a shared resource.
• access to the resource will be requested from multiple, disparate parts of the system.
• there can be only one object.

If your proposed Singleton has only one or two of these requirements, a redesign is almost always the correct option.

For example, a printer spooler is unlikely to be called from more than one place (the Print menu), so you can use mutexes to solve the concurrent access problem.

A simple logger is the most obvious example of a possibly-valid Singleton, but this can change with more complex logging schemes.