This paper reports the development of the Concerto platform, which is dedicated to supporting the deployment of resource-aware parallel Java components on heterogeneous distributed platforms, such as pools of workstations in labs or offices. We propose a basic model of a parallel Java component and present some tools that facilitate the management and the deployment of such a component on a distributed architecture. The Concerto platform also defines and implements an open and extensible framework dedicated to the observation of the distributed environment on which a component is deployed. Support is provided for modeling the execution environment as a set of resources and for monitoring these resources in a distributed way.