Makeup is the classic adapter; it converts the interface of the actor (facial-makeup for actors and body-airbrushing for models) into the interface expected (perfect pretty people) by their client (viewers/audience).

Behind the scenes, a car’s odometer converts the number of turns of the wheel into a representation of the number of miles the driver has traveled.  How does it do this?  A cable runs from the gearbox up to the dash-board of the car and turns a series of minute gears called cog-wheels.  Naturally, since the engine is turning the gears in the gearbox, it also turns the speedo-cable and for every couple of hundred turns of the wheel, the mile-digit of the odometer kicks over and shows a mile.  The speedometer is a bit trickier. Based on Faraday’s principle, electromagnets within the speedometer (again turned by the speedo-cable) turn past a stationary magnet.  The faster the cable spins, the faster the magnets crash through the stationary magnetic field and the greater the voltage induced in the electromagnet.  Your speedometer cable is in effect a crude electricity generator/voltmeter since the speedo-needle simply measures the voltage induced in the magnet.

By now you are wondering whether this tutorial has gone 50 mph down the wrong road.  Not quite, you see another adapter that many folks will be familiar with is the speedometer and odometer. These devices do several adaptations behind the scenes in a manner which makes for seamless interpretation of speed and distance traveled respectively.  But in reality, they are not measuring speed, but the number of turns of the wheel.  This is why if you jack up the car and turn the wheel, your “speed” seems to go from 0 to 10mph or so.

This illustrates the workings of the adapter pattern quite nicely.  Supposing I said my 14 year old carbureted car (properly tuned) gives me 31,000 wheel-turns per gallon in the city/43000 WTPG on the highway.  Admit it, you would be quite perplexed.  However, if I told you that I got 24 mpg city/33 Highway then you would respond without thinking, “That piece of junk gives such great mileage?"  I would be offended, but complimented simultaneously since I love my old car and feel quite proud that I can keep it running well.  You see, the great job of adaptation which the odometer does allows you the listener to be able to relate to fuel efficiency when it is measured in miles per gallon.  You think in miles, you calculate your trip in miles; you calculate your trip costs in miles. And so the odometer adapts the wheel-revolutions to a figure you can relate to and work with in a meaningful way.

In the adapter pattern, there is an adaptee class.  This class has an interface which clients cannot be expected to work with for one reason or the other.  In most descriptions of the pattern its incompatibility is because the client has already been wired-up to interact with some other interface.  In our scenario, the adaptee is the wheel.  The interface which the wheel exposes is the wheel-turn-rate.  It is the job of the cable/cog-wheels to capture the wheel turn rate and turn it into something readable by humans.  Similarly, in the adapter pattern the adapter inherits the interface which is un-readable and presents an interface which is readable.  In the speedometer example we have one final item and this is the speedometer/odometer display.  This is the public and visible interface which the driver will glance at frantically when he sees the policeman pointing something at him.  He will brake until the speedometer shows him going a speed within the legal limit.  Similarly, in the adapter pattern the Target is the interface which the client will be able to interact with and do useful work through.

The client in the adapter pattern interacts with the target interface.  This is mirrored in the motoring situation where the driver (the client) reads the speedometer (target interface).

Putting it all together, we have an adaptee class which clients do not know how to work with, an adapter class which is configured with the interface of the adaptee and so uses the adaptee’s outputs as its inputs.  Finally, it has a public interface which is useful to the client and so the client interacts with the adapter through public interface it exposes and gets the adapted outputs.

In fact any device or system which performs conversion shows the intent and operation of the adapter pattern.  The adapter pattern could have easily been called the converter pattern.

There is a trick in all of this speed business.  Did you know that changing the size of your tires will change the accuracy of your speedometer and odometer?  This is due to the fact that 50mph always translates to a fixed wheel turn rate.  This is unchangeable.  However, with bigger tires, every turn of your wheel means you are actually covering more distance.  So your odometer, trip-meter, speed and mpg calculations all get thrown off with a changing tire size.  Technically, the fact that your tires experience tread-wear means that there is also minute and very gradual variation in all the above measures as time goes by.  This brings up an important point.  In some cases, adapters may need to be calibrated (see the pattern-tweaking section).

In the GoF world, we actually have two major types of adapters.  The class adapter inherits publicly from the target class and privately from the adaptee class.  In C++ you can do multiple inheritances, but not so in VB.NET.  So in VB.NET we publicly implement the interface of the adapter and privately inherit the target class.

In the case of object adapters, we inherit publicly from the target interface while containing an object reference to the adaptee.