Patent ID: 6973647

Claim:
A software deployment tool stored on a computer readable storage medium for use with a software package including a software package file incorporating at least one action defining respective modifications to a client processing system and at least one file required to implement at least one modifying action, said tool comprising: a plurality of classes, each class corresponding to a respective type of action wherein the software package comprises a hierarchical structure of leaf and branch nodes capable of being traversed in a top-down manner and each leaf node corresponding to said respective type of action; means for reading said software package file and instantiating a class having attributes corresponding to the respective type of each of the at least one action of said software package file and setting the attributes of the at least one class according to the respective action definition in said software package file; means for executing a check method on at least one of each of said at least one class instances to determine if a deployment operation can be implemented in a specified first mode; means, responsive to a successful check, for executing a first method on each of said at least one class instances in said first mode, said first method stored on the computer readable storage medium; and means, responsive to check failure of any class instance, for executing a second method on each of said at least one class instances in a second mode, the second mode being less preferable than the first mode, said second method stored on the computer readable storage medium.