The invention is a method and apparatus that, upon receipt of a Web service deployment artifact, attempts to determine a deployment strategy for the Web service and deploy the Web service using that strategy. The invention stores a plurality of deployment strategies and corresponding deployment identifiers. When it receives a deployment artifact, it checks if it is a recognized deployment descriptor object that is registered with it as a deployment identifier, and, if so, runs the corresponding deployment strategy to deploy the Web service. If this scheme does not work, it tries a second scheme in which it assumes that the artifact is a URL or URI character string and attempts to parse the artifact to determine the extension of the provided resource and use it as its deployment identifier. If it determines and recognizes the extension, it attempts to deploy the Web service utilizing the deployment strategy that it has registered as corresponding to that extension/identifier. If that is unsuccessful, it attempts to parse the provided resource to create a Document Object Model (DOM) and then queries the DOM's namespace for a deployment strategy.