The Remote Software Toolkit (ReST) project was started after observing the difficulties involved in distributing, maintaining, and monitoring software in distributed environments. It is not uncommon for the effort needed to distribute a piece of software across a large, heterogeneous environment to outweigh the benefit of having the software in such an environment. ReST aims to provide a framework for application developers, rather than a suite of applications for users of distributed environments. The three primary parts of the ReST project are the ReST Installer, Explorer, and Monitor. Each component has been written to be modular and easily extended for use in a wide range of other projects.