Real-world examples
When you are traveling from most European countries to the UK or USA, or the other way around, you need to use a plug adapter for charging your laptop. The same kind of adapter is needed for connecting some devices to your computer: the USB adapter.
In the software category, the Zope application server (http://www.zope.org) is known for its Zope Component Architecture (ZCA), which contributed an implementation of interfaces and adapters used by several big Python web projects. Pyramid, built by former Zope developers, is a Python web framework that took good ideas from Zope to provide a more modular approach for developing web apps. Pyramid uses adapters for making it possible for existing objects to conform to specific APIs without the need to modify them. Another project from the Zope ecosystem, Plone CMS, uses adapters under the hood.
