In this work we propose the use of Alua, an event-driven communication mechanism for coordinating and developing distributed parallel applications, based on the interpreted language Lua. Alua adopts a multilinguage programming model for distributed parallel applications, acting as a gluing element among precompiled program parts running on different machines. New developments in parallel programming, such as Grid computing, and current interest in wide-area distributed computing demand new levels of flexibility, such as the use of adaptive strategies and the ability for an user to interfer with a computation without having to stop it. Furthermore, because of its asynchronous nature, event-driven programming provides a suitable model for environments subject to failures and delays that are frequent in the context of geographically distributed computing. In this work we show that ALua can achieve the required flexibility through mechanisms for monitoring and adapting not only applications, but also the execution environment, and also exploit its interpretive nature to allow the programmer to modify the behavior of the application during its execution.