Dependency injection vs Singleton pattern

[Manikandan Swaminathan]

Hi ranchers,

Nowadays, i am coming across many instances where people/developers are willing to use dependency injection rather than singleton classes/patterns?Can the dependency injection be really used in all the places/situations where a singleton class is needed?
Need your thoughts/suggestions on this.

Cheers

[Nathan Pruett]

The Singleton pattern is mostly considered an *anti*-pattern now. Static creation makes it difficult to test and, if suddenly the class doesn't need to be a singleton anymore, requires lots of changes, because you have to change how all the users of the class get the reference.

Dependency injection can create singleton objects in an application through only configuration. The DI container handles the creation of classes and passing references to users of the class around - so the class doesn't need to define static creation methods; and users of the class don't have to know it's a singleton to get a reference, it's reference is just passed to the class like any other dependency.

[John Pradeep.v]

Adding to what Nathan said, leaving the object creation strategy to a Dependency injection container makes it easy to inject mock version of the dependencies and test the class under isolation.
Nevertheless, the DI framework can be instructed to maintain a single instance of the class...