Software components turn out to be a convenient model to build complex applications for scientific computing and to run them on a computational grid. However, deploying complex, component-based applications in a grid environment is particularly arduous. To prevent the user from directly dealing with a large number of execution hosts and their heterogeneity within a grid, the application deployment phase must be as automatic as possible. This paper describes an architecture for automatic deployment of component-based applications on computational grids. In the context of the CORBA Component Model (CCM), this paper details all the steps to achieve an automatic deployment of components as well as the entities involved: a grid access middleware and its grid information service (like OGSI), a component deployment model, as specified by CCM, an enriched application description and a deployment planner in order to select resources and map components onto computers. R