Patent ID: 8046692

Claim:
A method for providing an interactive user interface for displaying mappings between a plurality of modules of a distributed application and a plurality of deployment targets in a distributed environment to which the plurality of modules are deployed, the method comprising: an act of a computing system, which includes one or more processors, accessing a plurality of module representations, each corresponding to one of the plurality of modules of the distributed application, each module representation comprising declarative deployment data for a corresponding module that describes requirements and capabilities of the corresponding module, including a required runtime of the corresponding module; an act of the computing system accessing a plurality of deployment target representations, each corresponding to one of the plurality of deployment targets, each deployment target representation comprising declarative deployment data describing physical characteristics and runtime characteristics of a corresponding deployment target, each deployment target comprising a particular combination of a particular physical machine and a particular runtime present on the particular physical machine; an act of the computing system identifying one or more correlations between the plurality of modules and the plurality of deployment targets, based on the module representations and the target representations, including at least matching a required runtime of each of the plurality of modules with one or more deployment targets; an act of the computing system using the plurality of module representations to display a plurality of module items at the interactive user interface, each module item representing one or more modules of the plurality of modules of the distributed application; an act of the computing system using the plurality of deployment target representations to display a plurality of deployment target items at the interactive user interface, each deployment target item representing one or more deployment targets of the plurality of deployment targets in the distributed environment; and an act of the computing system displaying a correlation item for each of the identified one or more correlations, each correlation item representing a correlation between a module of the plurality of modules of the distributed application and a corresponding deployment target of the plurality of deployment targets in the distributed environment.