In the latest post in their series looking at common programming design patterns, NetTuts.com talks about the Adapter pattern. This pattern makes it easier to swap out different connection types via an abstracted interface.

In this article, we will continue our discussion on design patterns by taking a look at the adapter design pattern. This particular pattern can be used when your code is dependent on some external API, or any other class that is prone to change frequently. This pattern falls under the category of "structural patterns" because it teaches us how our code and our classes should be structured in order to manage and/or extend them easily.

He starts off with the problem he's aiming to solve: a change in a "Twitter" class from one method name to another. An "adapter" lets an existing class be used from another interface, requiring no to minimal changes to the original class. He refactors the example to use an example of an adapter, creating a class that defines an object that passes in the original "Twitter" class instance and wraps the "send" call in its own method. With this in place, he also shows how to create a brand new adapter for Facebook, mimicking the "send" method, just with different functionality.