For use in an integrated development environment, such as Eclipse, a common connection registry of connections to remote systems is presented. The connection registry contains objects and subsystem objects. The connection objects have attribute information for the remote system whereas the subsystem objects contain information specific to a particular tool and connection. The framework further presents a common user interface by which tools can be registered within a connection, or by which a new connection can be created. The common user interface presents application program interfaces by which connection objects and subsystem objects can be created, retrieved, maintained, updated, modified, stored in the registry, and/or deleted, etc. The framework is capable of maintaining connections and tools within an integrated development environment independent of the type and/or operating system of the remote systems, the programming language of the tools, etc.