Recent developments in grid middleware and infrastructure have made it possible for a new generation of scientists, e-Scientists, to envisage and design large-scale computational experiments. However, while scheduling and execution of these experiments has become common, developing, deploying and maintaining application software across a large distributed grid remains a difficult and time consuming task. Without simple application deployment, the potential of grids cannot be realized by grid users. In response, this paper presents the motivation, design, development and demonstration of a framework for grid application deployment. Using this framework, e-Scientists can develop platform-independent parallel applications, characterise and identify suitable computational resources and deploy applications easily.