An adapter class provides an empty implementation of all methods in an event listener interface. Adapter classes are useful when you want to receive and process only some of the events that are handled by a particular event listener interface. You can define a new class to act listener by extending one of the adapter classes and implementing only those events in which you are interested. For example, the MouseMotionAdapter class has two methods, mouseDragged()and mouseMoved(). The signatures of these empty are exactly as defined in the MouseMotionListener interface. If you are interested in only mouse drag events, then you could simply extend MouseMotionAdapter and implement mouseDragged()