Posted by Gordon Burditt on 12/01/07 01:34

>I was reading an article on TalkPHP (http://www.talkphp.com/
>showthread.php?t=1304) about singletons but I'm afraid I don't
>understand why I need to use them. I understand how to code them
>perfectly, it's just the theory I'm having some problems with. I did
>try searching on Wikipedia but it didn't yield any satisfactory
>reasoning, for me.
>
>Could someone explain it to me in basic terms, please. I initially
>came across singletons when I was looking for ways in which to save on
>the extra memory of instantiating many of the same objects, and if I
>am right, a singleton would do just that? I'm just not sure how as it
>looks fairly straightforward in its implementation.

A singleton is based on the assumption that there is only one of
something, and you can represent that something with an object.
For example, if you want to represent pressing THE key on THE
keyboard with THE finger, you can use singletons for key, keyboard,
and finger. IMHO, such an assumption is usually silly. There's
only one database? Nonsense, I've had several pages which used 3
databases on 3 different servers (the purpose was to test data
migration before actually switching over to the new system).

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