Patent ID: 7861243

Claim:
A method of automatically deploying program units to a cluster of networked servers, comprising: assembling one or more program units for deploying to a cluster of one or more application servers; retrieving type information related to the cluster of networked servers from a deployment server, the type information identifying a type of application server installed on one or more nodes to which to deploy the program units; using a universal deployment tool to dynamically load an application server plugin to perform cluster deployment on the type of application server, wherein the application server plugin: is dynamically loadable by the universal deployment tool upon receiving a user identification of the cluster of one or more application servers; corresponds to at least one of the application servers in the cluster of one or more application servers; and encapsulates deployment configurations associated with the one or more program units, the deployment configurations corresponding to the at least one of the application servers; automatically, and without user input, using the dynamically loaded application server plugin to generate a script to use a specific utility of the application server for generation of deployment descriptors from the type information retrieved from the deployment server, the deployment descriptors suitable for the type of application server; and deploying the one or more program units to the cluster of the one or more application servers using at least the deployment descriptor.