NAME

       Class::Adapter - Perl implementation of the "Adapter" Design Pattern

DESCRIPTION

       The "Class::Adapter" class is intended as an abstract base class for creating any sort of
       class or object that follows the Adapter pattern.

   What is an Adapter?
       The term Adapter refers to a "Design Pattern" of the same name, from the famous "Gang of
       Four" book "Design Patterns". Although their original implementation was designed for Java
       and similar single-inheritance strictly-typed langauge, the situation for which it applies
       is still valid.

       An Adapter in this Perl sense of the term is when a class is created to achieve by
       composition (objects containing other object) something that can't be achieved by
       inheritance (sub-classing).

       This is similar to the Decorator pattern, but is intended to be applied on a class-by-
       class basis, as opposed to being able to be applied one object at a time, as is the case
       with the Decorator pattern.

       The "Class::Adapter" object holds a parent object that it "wraps", and when a method is
       called on the "Class::Adapter", it manually calls the same (or different) method with the
       same (or different) parameters on the parent object contained within it.

       Instead of these custom methods being hooked in on an object-by-object basis, they are
       defined at the class level.

       Basically, a "Class::Adapter" is one of your fall-back positions when Perl's inheritance
       model fails you, or is no longer good enough, and you need to do something twisty in order
       to make several APIs play nicely with each other.

   What can I do with the actual Class::Adapter class
       Well... nothing really. It exist to provide some extremely low level fundamental methods,
       and to provide a common base for inheritance of Adapter classes.

       The base "Class::Adapter" class doesn't even implement a way to push method calls through
       to the underlying object, since the way in which that happens is the bit that changes from
       case to case.

       To actually DO something, you probably want to go take a look at Class::Adapter::Builder,
       which makes the creation of Adapter classes relatively quick and easy.

METHODS

       The "Class::Adapter" class itself supplies only the two most common methods, a default
       constructor and a private method to access the underlying object.

   new $object
       The default "new" constructor takes a single object as argument and creates a new object
       which holds the passed object.

       Returns a new "Class::Adapter" object, or "undef" if you do not pass in an object.

   _OBJECT_
       The "_OBJECT_" method is provided primarily as a convenience, and a tool for people
       implementing sub-classes, and allows the "Class::Adapter" interface to provide a
       guarenteed correct way of getting to the underlying object, should you need to do so.

SUPPORT

       Bugs should be reported via the CPAN bug tracker at

       <http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=Class-Adapter>

       For other issues, contact the author.

TO DO

       - Write more comprehensive tests

AUTHOR

       Adam Kennedy <adamk@cpan.org>

SEE ALSO

       Class::Adapter::Clear, Class::Adapter::Builder, Class::Decorator

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright 2005 - 2010 Adam Kennedy.

       This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same
       terms as Perl itself.

       The full text of the license can be found in the LICENSE file included with this module.