Drag-and-drop is probably one of the mostly successful and generic illustrations of direct manipulation technique available in today’s WIMP interfaces. Yet it does not adapt without major evolutions to the emerging new devices and environments. Over the past years, several evolutions of drag-and-drop have emerged. The diver- sity of implementations strategies makes them difficult to integrate into an existing windowing system. At the same time, standard existing drag-and-drop implementa- tions vary widely across different windowing systems or toolkit and do not facilitate integration or evolution. The aim of this paper is to propose a unifying implementation model capable of handling most drag-and-drop extensions in a consistent framework while supporting distributed environments. The proposed model aims at facilitating the implemen- tation and evolution of drag-and-drop in future windowing systems. Its benefits are shown with a Java-based implementation. This work builds upon a synthesis of drag-and-drop implementations, an analysis of requirements of recent evolutions and a dedicated interaction model based on instrumental interaction.