Re: Initializing Singletons

From:
Tom Anderson <twic@urchin.earth.li>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Thu, 8 May 2008 15:55:03 +0100
Message-ID:
<Pine.LNX.4.64.0805081548100.17425@urchin.earth.li>
On Thu, 8 May 2008, Jason Cavett wrote:

I'm curious - is it possible (and if so, how) to initialize a Singleton
class when the class used for initialization must also get an instance
of the Singleton class?


The way you want to do it, no.

Here's a pseudocode example to make that more clear...

class SingletonClass {

 private SingletonClass() {
      ConfigFileReader reader = new ConfigFileReader();
      reader.read();
 }

 // other singleton stuff
}

class ConfigFileReader {

 public ConfigFileReader() {
   // do stuff
 }

 public void read() {
   // read in the config file and get the appropriate information
   SingletonClass.getInstance().setValues(...);
 }
}

I don't *think* what I want to do is possible. But, if it is, I'm not
sure how to do it. Any insight would be appreciated.


Are you writing ConfigFileReader? If so, make read take a SingletonClass
as a parameter:

class ConfigFileReader {
  public void read(SingletonClass singleton) {
  singleton.setValues(...) ;
  }
}

That's probably the easiest way.

Another thing you could do would be to initialise the singleton instance a
bit differently, so that getInstance becomes usable (FSVO 'usable') before
the constructor finishes:

class SingletonClass {
  private static SingletonClass INSTANCE ;
  static {
  new SingletonClass() ;
  }
  public SingletonClass()
  {
  INSTANCE = this ;
  ConfigFileReader reader = new ConfigFileReader() ;
  reader.read() ;
  }
}

But that's fairly sick. It also means that you're putting an uninitialised
object in the INSTANCE field, which is potentially risky.

tom

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