1. A method of developing one or more application programs that cooperate to manage a distributed system comprising one or more servers, wherein at least one application program is associated with each server, the method including the steps: a) defining one or more managed objects associated with the distributed system in an object-oriented resource definition language and storing the definition of the one or more managed objects in one or more resource definition language files, wherein the definition of the one or more managed objects is based on an existing design and hierarchical structure of the distributed system, wherein parent-child relationships between the one or more managed objects are identified in the one or more resource definition language files using the object-oriented resource definition language to define the one or more managed objects in relation to the hierarchical structure of the distributed system; b) parsing the one or more resource definition language files to ensure conformity with the object-oriented resource definition language and creating an intermediate representation of the distributed system from the one or more conforming resource definition language files; c) processing the intermediate representation of the distributed system to form one or more programming language classes, one or more database definition files, and one or more script files; d) providing a reusable asset center framework to facilitate development of the one or more application programs, the reusable asset center including an SNMP agent framework that provides SNMP interface functionality to at least one of the one or more application programs, wherein the SNMP agent framework includes an SNMP table management object framework class that converts SNMP requests to managed object framework commands and an SNMP table class that includes procedures for accessing and chancing data in tables; and e) building the one or more application programs from at least the one or more programming language classes, one or more database definition files, one or more script files, and the reusable asset framework.