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Message:

Problems with Singletons and Static References

Posted by Matt Gerrans on February 22, 2002 at 1:59 PM

Hmm... actually this.manager = this; seems to compile and work okay even though it doesn't really make any sense and certainly makes for confusing code. I guess it follows the same idea that you can use any instance to access a static method (which some people think should not be the case), but if I wrote the compiler, it would be an error, or at the very least, a warning.

> I'm trying to implement a class that uses a static method to return an instance of itself to the calling object. It's not precisely a singleton because it can also be instantiated via a call to a constructor.

> I've gotten it to work more or less correctly, but I'm having trouble with methods in the instance that access non-static variables:

> The pertinent code follows:

> public class GeneManager {

> private GeneManagerGUI gui;

> private static GeneManager manager;
> private static boolean initialized = false;

>
> public GeneManager() {
> this.manager = this;
> initialized = true;
> }