JSF and Singleton design pattern

Singleton is a Creational Design Pattern with the following object structural:

The GoF (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides) book describes this pattern as "Ensure a class has only one instance and provide a global point of access to it."

A Java class is considered a singleton if:

·         it has one instance

·         provide a global point of access to it

Main aspects that you should keep in mind is that a singleton classes are:

·         not unit testable

·         not abstractable

·         not extendable

In order to respect the contract imposed by a singleton class you can write several implementations:

·         the singleton instance is created by an explicit call (in this case, you need to synchronize the creation for multithreaded environment)

public class FooSingleton {

 private static FooSingleton instance;

 // "hidden" constructor

 private FooSingleton() {}

 // obtain FooSingleton instance

 public static synchronized FooSingleton getInstance() {

  if (instance == null){

      instance = new FooSingleton();

  }

  return instance;

 }

}

·         the singleton instance is created at the same time you load the class (in this case, there is no need to synchronize the creation)

public class FooSingleton {

 private final static FooSingleton instance=new FooSingleton();

 // "hidden" constructor

 private FooSingleton() {}

 // obtain FooSingleton instance

 public static FooSingleton getInstance() {

  return instance;

 }

}

·         use a static block to obtain lazy initialization:

public class FooSingleton {

 private static FooSingleton instance=null;

 static {

        instance=new FooSingleton();

 }

 // "hidden" constructor

 private FooSingleton() {}

 // obtain FooSingleton instance

 public static FooSingleton getInstance() {

  return instance;

 }

}

·         use double‐checked locking - before locking on the singleton class and before the creation of the object:

public class FooSingleton {

 private volatile FooSingleton instance;

 // "hidden" constructor

 private FooSingleton() {}

 // obtain FooSingleton instance

 public FooSingleton getInstance() {

  if (instance == null) {

      synchronized (FooSingleton.class) {

       if (instance == null) {

           instance = new FooSingleton();

       }

      }

  }

  return instance;

 }

}

·         enum type implementation:

public enum FooSingletonEnum {

 INSTANCE;

 public void fooAction(){}

}

FooSingletonEnum foo = FooSingletonEnum.INSTANCE;

But, Java EE allows us to turn a class into a singleton via:

·         @Singleton for EJB (javax.ejb.Singleton)

                JSR-318 specification - Single thread safe and transactional shared instance. This is useful for EJBs (enterprise services) and it is managed by the EJB container.

·         @Singleton for CDI (javax.inject.Singleton)

JSR 330 specification  - In CDI this is a pseudo-scope that indicates that a bean has a single instance. CDI managed beans can be successfully used in JSF, but there is a problem with CDI managed beans annotated with @Singleton. They DON'T use proxy objects! Since there is a direct reference instead of a proxy we have some serialization issues. In order to keep the singleton state, we need to:

                - having the singleton bean implement writeResolve() and readReplace() (as defined by the Java serialization specification),

                - make sure the client keeps only a transient reference to the singleton bean, or

                - give the client a reference of type Instance<X> where X is the bean type of the singleton bean.

See: The singleton pseudo-scope

·         @ApplicationScoped  for CDI (javax.enterprise.inject.ApplicationScoped)

JSR 229 specification - The CDI application scope which guarantee that the class is instantiated only once. This is preferable because is much simpler to develop, test and maintain. So, when CDI is available, use this for having a singleton "surrogate" that provides a single instance and application scoped data.

·         @ApplicationScoped  for JSF (javax.faces.bean.ApplicationScoped)

JSR 314 specification - The JSF application scope which guarantee that the class is instantiated only once - JSF as framework guarantee that only one instance will be created and reused during web application's lifetime. Again, this is preferable because is much simpler to develop, test and maintain.

See: JSF singleton vs application scoped managed bean - differences?

JSF uses singletons for different purposes. Some cases are mentioned below:

 -the JSF entry point, FacesServlet 
 -the Application and lifecycle instances
  -the JSF phase listeners
 -the navigation and view handlers