The use of the singleton pattern is a fairly controversial subject among certain corners of the development community. One of the main reasons for this is that the singleton pattern is probably the most overused and misused pattern. Another reason this pattern is controversial is that the singleton pattern introduces a global state into an application, which provides the ability to change the object at any point within the application. The singleton pattern can also introduce hidden dependencies and tight compiling. My personal opinion is that if the singleton pattern is used correctly, there is nothing wrong with using it. However, we do need to be careful not to misuse it.
The singleton pattern restricts the ...
