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.