Should member variables of global objects be made global as well?
- by David Wong
I'm developing plugins in Eclipse which mandates the use of singleton pattern for the Plugin class in order to access the runtime plugin. The class holds references to objects such as Configuration and Resources.
In Eclipse 3.0 plug-in runtime objects
are not globally managed and so are
not generically accessible. Rather,
each plug-in is free to declare API
which exposes the plug-in runtime
object (e.g., MyPlugin.getInstance()
In order for the other components of my system to access these objects, I have to do the following:
MyPlugin.getInstance().getConfig().getValue(MyPlugin.CONFIGKEY_SOMEPARAMETER);
, which is overly verbose IMO.
Since MyPlugin provides global access, wouldn't it be easier for me to just provide global access to the objects it manages as well?
MyConfig.getValue(MyPlugin.CONFIGKEY_SOMEPARAMETER);
Any thoughts?
(I'm actually asking because I was reading about the whole "Global variable access and singletons are evil" debates)
