The present need for high data rate communication applications and freedom to communicate from anywhere at any time demands more and more from digital processing hardware. The concept of software defined radio and reconfigurable networks requires many new mechanisms and subsystems to allow the implementation of such networks. The paper presents a solution to the problem of managing the configuration of a mixture of configurable processing hardware as may be used to implement a reconfigurable radio network. The EU IST CAST (configurable radio with advanced software technologies) project forms the demonstrator for the system illustrating how a Java based framework can be used to manage a database oriented method of device and function classification. Scalability is assured for operation over massive large scale reconfigurable communication networks.