Abstract: One embodiment of the present invention provides a system that automatically propagates distributed components during development of a distributed application. The system operates by identifying any distributed components within the distributed application that need to be deployed to remote locations. For each distributed component that needs to be deployed to a remote location, the system identifies the remote location, and causes the distributed component to be deployed to the remote location. In this way, a programmer of the distributed application does not have to enter explicit commands to deploy distributed components. In one embodiment of the present invention, the system additionally encapsulates distributed components as local components, so that the distributed components appear to be local components.