The present invention relates to a system, method and article of manufacture wherein a plurality of objects, components, programming interfaces and user interfaces are defined to facilitate a universally applicable editing, testing and execution system for a plurality of configurable data processing systems and the edit-time data that drives them. A meta-model provides for the specification of formations of edit-time data and constraints thereof and meta-model data specifies the allowable formations of edit-time data. Coded logic steps interpret meta-model data together with edit-time data to cause a user interface to visually represent edit-time data to the user in a specified formation. The system is comprised in such a way as to not require source code changes to support varied and unanticipated edit-time data models resulting from different instantiations of the meta-model into meta-model data.