Question

Name the design considerations in deciding between use of a singleton versus a static class. In doing this, you’re kind of forced to contrast the two, so whatever contrasts you can come up with are also useful in showing your thought process! Also, every interviewer likes to see illustrative examples. 🙂

Answer 1

• Singletons can implement interfaces and inherit from other classes.
• Singletons can be lazy loaded. Only when it is actually needed. That’s very handy if the initialisation includes expensive resource loading or database connections.
• Singletons offer an actual object.
• Singletons can be extended into a factory. The object management behind the scenes is abstract so it’s better maintainable and results in better code.