Abstract: Described herein are methods and systems for providing software development services in a networked software development environment. For instance, instead of performing compilation on a stand-alone desktop computer, software development activities including, compilation are performed by a service provider in response to a general query from a client requester. Such a network desirably has a global view of the source files being processed by various software development tools associated therewith. This global view enables many interesting approaches including the ability to perform analysis and optimizations to the input files not specified by the client requester. Such anticipatory processing may be based on the history and pattern of previous requests and availability of software development tools that the client requester is not aware of, for instance.

Abstract: Described herein is at least one implementation employing multiple self-describing software artifacts persisted on one or more computer-storage media of a software-based computer. In this implementation, each artifact is representative of at least part of the software components (e.g., load modules, processes, applications, and operating system components) of the computing system and each artifact is described by at least one associated “manifest,” which include metadata declarative descriptions of the associated artifact.