Patent ID: 7017143

Claim:
A computer software application development system comprising: a first group of system users responsible for modifying one or more external resource files written in a markup language, at least one of the external resource files comprising at least one extensible markup language tag associated with at least one of a plurality of platform namespaces; a second group of system users responsible for writing computer software code; a graphical control locator for locating the one or more external resource files; a parser for identifying a requested parameter stored in the one or more external resource files; and a runtime tree built from the one or more external resource files in response to a resource request that references at least one of a plurality of graphical controls; wherein at least some of the plurality of graphical controls have a parent-child relationship with others of the plurality of graphical controls; and wherein a reference to the runtime tree is sent to each graphical control in a parent-child relationship with the at least one of the plurality of graphical controls referenced by the resource request.