Patent ID: 8171141

Claim:
A system comprising: a repository configured to store a plurality of resources from a distribution of a general purpose runtime environment and repository metadata, the repository metadata including characteristics of each of the plurality of resources; a stack manager configured to: categorize members of the plurality of resources based on the characteristics into a plurality of categories based on criteria associated with the plurality of categories; receive from a user one or more category selections in the plurality of categories, the one or more category selections indicating whether a category should be included in or excluded from an application specific runtime environment; and select from among the members of the plurality of resources for inclusion in or exclusion from the application specific runtime environment, wherein a resource is included in or excluded from the application specific runtime environment based on the resource being associated with a category selection in the one or more category selections; and a provisioning server configured to provision the application specific runtime environment for a first executable application on a computing device using the selection of members of the plurality of resources by the stack manager, the application specific runtime environment including a subset of resources from the distribution of the general purpose runtime environment required by the application to run on the computing device.