The Singleton Pattern is a design pattern that restricts the instantiation of a class to a single instance and provides a global point of access to that instance. This is particularly useful when exactly one object is needed to coordinate actions across the system, such as managing shared resources or configurations.
- Single Instance: Ensures that only one instance of the class exists throughout the application.
- Global Access: Provides a static method to access the instance, allowing it to be easily retrieved from anywhere in the code.
- Lazy Initialization: The instance is created only when it is needed, which can help improve performance and resource management.
- Managing application-wide settings or configurations.
- Implementing logging mechanisms where a single logger instance is required.
- Controlling access to shared resources, such as database connections or thread pools.
In a typical implementation, the constructor of the class is made private to prevent direct instantiation. A static method (often called Instance) is provided to return the single instance of the class, creating it if it does not already exist.