The road to a more configurable and adaptive communication and coordination support

This paper discusses the problem of designing and implementing the communication and coordination support for distributed applications. One way to implement these services is to rely on application-specific solutions, in an attempt to obtain the best performance possible. In this paper, we champion a different approach that consists in supporting adaptation, configuration and composition at all levels of the system development, namely: i) abstractions; ii) algorithms and; iii) implementations. Using different examples we show that this approach allows to obtain solutions that are generic, re-usable and efficient.