Adapter Pattern

Benjamín Núñez González

An adapter pattern refers to structural design patterns.

The adapter provides data / interface conversion between two classes / interfaces.

Suppose we are developing a system for determining the goal of a buyer in a store based on neural networks. The system receives a video stream from the store’s camera, determines customers according to their behavior, classifies them into groups. Types of groups – came to buy (potential buyer), just look (onlooker), came to steal something (thief), came to hand over goods (disgruntled buyer), came drunk / high (potential rowdy).

Like all experienced developers, we find a ready-made neural network that can classify species of monkeys in a cage according to the video stream, which the zoological institute of the Berlin zoo has kindly laid out for free access, retrain it on the video stream from the store and get a working state-of-the-art system.

There is only a small problem – the video stream is encoded in mpeg2 format, and our system only supports OGG Theora. We do not have the source code of the system, the only thing we can do is change the dataset and train the neural network. What to do? Write an adapter class that will translate the stream from mpeg2 -> OGG Theora and give into the neural network.

According to the classical scheme, client, target, adaptee and adapter are involved in the pattern. In this case, the client is a neural network that receives a video stream in Theora OGG, the target is the interface with which it interacts, adaptee is the interface that sends the video stream to mpeg2, the adapter converts mpeg2 to Theora OGG and sends via the target interface.

Sounds easy, right?

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adapter_pattern
https://refactoring.guru/design-patterns/adapter