Embodiments of the present invention address deficiencies of the art in respect to templated application deployment and provide a novel and non-obvious method, system and computer program product for the uniform specification of the creation and management of an application template. In one embodiment, a method for creating and managing application templates utilizing assets can be provided. The method can include grouping templated application components as assets described by a profile, building a manifest for the grouped assets, and packaging the grouped assets and the manifest in an archive. In this regard, grouping templated application components as assets described by a profile, can include grouping templated application components as Reusable Asset Specification (RAS) assets described by an RAS profile.