This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Sharable Objects
The Smalltalk Companion points out that sharable objects are much like Flyweights, although the purpose is somewhat different. When you have a very large object containing a lot of complex data, such as tables or bitmaps, you would want to minimize the number of instances of that object. Instead, in such cases, you'd return one instance to every part of the program that asked for it and avoid creating other instances.
A problem with such sharable objects occurs when one part of a program wants to change some data in a shared object. You then must decide whether to change the object for all users, prevent any change, or create a new instance with the changed data. If you change the object for every instance, you may have to notify them that the object has changed.
Sharable objects are also useful when you are referring to large data systems outside of C#, such as databases. The DBase class we developed previously in the Faccade pattern could be a candidate for a sharable object. We might not want a number of separate connections to the database from different program modules, preferring that only one be instantiated. However, should several modules in different threads decide to make queries simultaneously, the Database class might have to queue the queries or spawn extra connections.