Meaning of Declaring an object as private and static

Hi,

I would like to know what is the meaning of declaring an object as private static. What is the advantage of doing so.

e.g. public class Irfan {
private Irfan () {}
private static Irfan irfan = new Irfan();
}

This strategy is followed in Singleton Design pattern...

'private' means that the member is only visible from within the class itself and not from other code outside the class. For more info, see The Java Tutorial - Controlling Access to Members of a Class.

'static' means that there is only one instance of the variable per class, instead of one instance per object of the class. For more info, see The Java Tutorial - Understanding Instance and Class Members.

Now you can combine these concepts, so you have a variable that's only visible from inside the class itself and of which there's only one instance, shared by all objects of the class.

Thank you for your response.
I was confused if one instance is shared by all the objects...

Thank you very for for the very lucid explation....