Singleton Design Pattern in Javascript

Overview

For global state management in some frameworks like ReactJs; we already have Redux, React Context, Recoil, and Mobx… for handling that. But if we only need the vanilla javascript for handling specific state and avoid using the library to manage the state (like minimizing the bundle-size, avoid on creating too many instances…), we can use the help of design patterns.

What is the Singleton Design Pattern?

Singleton design pattern is the pattern in that we only create one static instance of the class.

Which can be accessed in all components, and functions without recreating or conflicting the instances.

Example

// Filename: singleton.js

class MyNameClass {
  constructor() {
    this._name
  }

  set name(value) {
    this._name = value
  }

  get name() {
    return this._name
  }
}

const Singleton = function () {
  let instance

  function createInstance() {
    return new MyNameClass()
  }

  return {
    getInstance: function () {
      if (!instance) {
        instance = createInstance()
      }
      return instance
    },
  }
}

export const singleton = Singleton()

The createInstance function for creating the instance of MyNameClass.

When requested the instance from MyNameClass, the method getInstance will be invoked. In the getInstance method only creating new MyNameClass when the instance of the class is not created and return the created instance.

// Filename: index.js

import { singleton } from './Singleton'

function main() {
  const instanceOne = singleton.getInstance()
  instanceOne.name = 'John Doe'

  const instanceTwo = singleton.getInstance()
  console.log('The second instance with name: ', instanceTwo.name)
  // Output - The second instance with name: John Doe

  console.log('Is same instance? ', instanceOne === instanceTwo)
  // Output - Is same instance?  true
}

main()

• At first we assign instanceOne variable with the instance returned from the singleton.getInstance()
• Then we set the name from instanceOne with value is John Doe
• After that, we create another constant instantTwo with the singleton object again.
• This time we will make a compare from the value to the instance, from the output that we can see the name from instanceTwo is same as the value we already set from instanceOne (is John Doe and is not undefined value), and both instance is the same with the returned is true.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• You can be sure that a class has only a single instance.
• A global access point to that instance.
• The singleton only initialized once.

Cons

• The Singleton is violate to the Single Responsibility Principle, via the SRP definition that a class only should only have one responsibility. But with the singleton pattern, it can carry too many responsibilities at the same time, this can make a deadlock when used in concurrency / multi-threads.
• The singleton design is getting us difficult to write the unit test.

Conclusion

With the only initialized once and can use in the global context, the singleton design pattern is very useful for some specific cases where we only need to store the data that using in the global and fewer changes like database connection, user profile account config…