GETTING AN INSTANCE OF THE SINGLETON

We need to provide an accessor method, that returns an instance of the SingletonObject class but doesn't allow more than one copy to be accessed. We can manually instantiate an object, but we need to keep a reference to the singleton so that subsequent calls to the accessor method can return the singleton (rather than creating a new one). To do this, provide a public static method called getSingletonObject(), and store a copy of the singleton in a private member variable.

public class SingletonObject
{
   private SingletonObject()
   {
       // no code req'd
   }

   public static SingletonObject getSingletonObject()
   {
     if (ref == null)
         // it's ok, we can call this constructor
         ref = new SingletonObject();
     return ref;
   }

   private static SingletonObject ref;
}

So far, so good. When first called, the getSingletonObject() method creates a singleton instance, assigns it to a member variable, and returns the singleton. Subsequent calls will return the same singleton, and all is well with the world. You could extend the functionality of the singleton object by adding new methods, to perform the types of tasks your singleton needs. So the singleton is done, right? Well almost.....