As data management applications grow more complex, they may need efficient distributed query processing, but also subscription management, data archival etc. To enact such applications, the current solution consists of stacking several systems together. The juxtaposition of different computing models prevents reasoning on the application as a whole, and wastes important opportunities to improve performance. We present a simple extension to the AXML [7] language, allowing it to declaratively specify and deploy complex applications based solely on XML and XML queries. Our main contribution is a full algebraic model for complex distributed AXML computations. While very expressive, the model is conceptually uniform, and enables numerous powerful optimizations across a distributed complex process.1