The present inventors devised, among other things, an application development system and method. One exemplary method entails providing a set of legal research application feature or functions and receiving a first configuration file from a user, selectively enabling or disabling one or more of the features to define a first legal research application on a first server for a first country. The method further entails receiving a second configuration file from a user, which similarly selectively enables of disables one or more of the features to define a second legal research application on a second server for a second country. The configuration files also customize the user interfaces accord to brand specific criteria for each of the countries.