The harmonization of software (cyber part) and hardware (physical part) in a cyber-physical system or component is an important challenge. One of the theoretical advantages of the cyber-physical formulation is the increased system operability. This results from a harmonized cyber interface that governs the interactions of different systems and components. However, the connection between both parts has been characterized by a much higher degree of heterogeneity due to distinct actuation/sensing devices and different controlling layers. The cyber-physical relation is specially important in the scope of industrial systems where the same generic cyber model will apply to components that, despite having the same function, denote a fairly different physical implementation. Agents have been widely considered as an implementation mechanism for creating cyber-physical industrial systems and JAVA has been one of the dominant programming languages. In this context, the paper proposes and discusses a JAVA-based Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that ensures the generic connectivity between the cyber and the physical parts through reconfiguration, rather than reprogramming. The performance of the proposed HAL was tested under different conditions in a test case where agents connect to standard programmable logic controllers over a TCPIP network.