Add to ORKGGRAPPLE is an EU funded IST FP7 project that brings together a group of researchers into adaptive learning technology and environments and developers of learning management systems (LMSs), in order to offer adaptive learning as a standard feature of future LMSs. This paper presents the adaptation engine used in GRAPPLE, and explains why we consider it to be a truly general-purpose adaptive learning environment (ALE). In particular the paper describes how the core adaptation component (or engine) can be configured to perform any kind of adaptation to any type of XML document, and how it is designed to communicate and work with other systems, in particular with (different) LMSs