In accordance with one embodiment of the present invention, there are provided mechanisms and methods for providing an application programming interface (API) for managing applications deployed on one or more servers. These mechanisms and methods can enable a software developer to create a single program that can discover and browse resources, such as JDBC connection pools, deployed applications and other resources, on any J2EE Application server, for example. In an embodiment, the APIs are part of the J2EE Management Specification, which specifies interface mechanisms for J2EE Application servers to describe their resources using a standard data model. Embodiments employing APIs conforming to the J2EE Management Specification can enable third party software, for example, to be used to monitor the applications.