PHP: singleton of children class

24 Jul 2014

As of PHP 5.3, there is a new feature: Late static binding which enables you get the final called class in a static inheritance.

This feature was named "late static bindings" with an internal perspective in mind. "Late binding" comes from the fact that static:: will not be resolved using the class where the method is defined but it will rather be computed using runtime information. It was also called a "static binding" as it can be used for (but is not limited to) static method calls.

In runtime:

get_called_class() can retrieve a string with the name of the called class.
static will introduce the scope.

With this feature, we can implement getting singleton of children class by a static method in parent class:

<?php
abstract class Base
{
    private static $instance;
    public $name;

    public static function getInstance()
    {
        $class = get_called_class();
        if (!self::$instance[$class])
        {
            // new $class() will work too
            self::$instance[$class] = new static();
        }
        return self::$instance[$class];
    }

    public abstract function getName();
}

class A extends Base
{
    public function getName()
    {
        return 'A';
    }
}
class B extends Base
{
    public function getName()
    {
        return 'B';
    }
}
echo A::getInstance()->getName(), "\n";
echo B::getInstance()->getName(), "\n";

The output will be:

A
B