Sensor network applications tend to exhibit significant highlevel commonalities along several major dimensions that have heretofore been underexposed, particularly in the areas of collection and dissemination. We have developed a component library, Sdlib, which presents the fundamental abstractions of collection and dissemination as part of a dataflow sytem. This allows application developers to rapidly develop applications at the nesC level. This means that Sdlib maintains significant expressivity while operating efficiently. We have built four applications, each faithful to a mature monolithic application, on top of Sdlib to compare its performance to that of original. We find that applications implemented with Sdlib are much simpler to write, just as resource efficient, and perform comparably to monolithic implementations. * This work will appear in Information Processing in Sensor Networks, Special Track on Sensor Platform, Tools and Design Methods. I will also be discussing more recent followup work as well.