In the distributed enterprise application integration system, modularized components located on multiple hosts are centrally managed so as to facilitate communication among application programs. Collaboration services traditionally associated with a central server, such as, for example, message queues, message publishers/subscribers, and message processes, are instead distributed to multiple hosts and monitored by a central registry service. This system allow configuration management to be performed in a central location using a top-level approach, while implementation and execution tasks are distributed and delegated to various components that communicate with the applications.