The construction of large scale e-Science grid experi-ments presents a challenge to e-Scientists because of the inherent difficulty of deploying applications over large scale heterogeneous grids. In spite of this, user-oriented application deployment has remained unsupported in grid middleware. This lack of support for application deploy-ment is strongly detrimental to the usability, evolution, uptake and continual development of the grid. This paper presents our motivation, design and implementation of the Distributed Ant user-oriented application deployment sys-tem, including recent extensions to support application deployment over heterogeneous grids. We also present a significant Distributed Ant deployment case study, demon-strating how a user-oriented application deployment system enables e-Science experiments.