In an embodiment of the present invention, at a Deployer level, an application software component is provided with a tree representation 510 of objects it contains. An object is a leaf node, with the attributes of the object being in nexus between the root and the leaf node. An accessor object 511 has methods to access the tree 510. In one embodiment of the present invention, at an administrator level, a handler object 611 in turn accesses accessor object 511. Handler object 611 may be part of a handler home object 619. Client applications 710 have lookup services 711 to access handler objects like 611, e.g. via a lookup home object 719, and handler home object 619.