Laravel - Diference betwen static methods and static instance() method

Question

I am seeing this practice in many Laravel applications, and I don't know the diferences o the reasons to use this.

Instead of having public static methods in the class, many people code only one static function that retrieves an instance of a class an this instace call the function.

This classes have no properties or anything that is needed to make the functions work, so I do not understand why use this way to work. I think this make code more dificult to read, in many cases.

Example, I see this laravel implementantion:

class MyClass
{
    public static function instance()
    {
        return new MyClass();
    }

    public function myStuff()
    {
        //my stuff
    }
}

//Calling it
MyClass::instance()->myStuff();

I think it would be more readable and same result making all it with static functions, like:

class MyClass
{    
    public static function myStuff()
    {
        //my stuff
    }
}

//Calling it
MyClass::myStuff();

What do you think about this?

Answer 1

We know about your concern. It is difficult to discuss what is better, depend your project, your style, your business. But we can give you a keyword to read more about that: Singleton Pattern