For the example application using dynamic adaptation, a mobile agent has been designed for the configuration of the default web browser. The task of the mobile agent is to visit a set of workstations, to retrieve local system information (physical memory, free disk space) and according to this information to change the parameters of the default web browser. This includes the setting of memory cache size, disk cache size, and various other parameters of web browsers. Adaptation is needed for the information retrieval which must be done in a system-specific, operating-system, browser-specific and even CPU-architecture-specific way, hence supporting our worst-case assumption that it cannot be implemented in pure Java.
Following the adaptation design pattern the functionality interfaces IMemory (retrieving physical memory), IDisk (retrieving free disk space) and IConfiguration (setting the browser parameters) have been declared. The adaptor generator creates the according adaptor classes from functionality interfaces taken as input: IMemory_Adaptor, IDisk_Adaptor and IConfiguration_Adaptor. A set of implementation classes for each functionality interface has been written for supporting various environments, with exact available choices currently determined by the selection of available platforms in our test lab.