This paper presents a language-based approach to service deployment. The language is called Abacus, which is a service-oriented programming language for grid applications. In Abacus, a service is abstracted as a basic language construct, and service deployment is expressed by a deployment statement. This approach allows an Abacus application to automatically deploy a service at runtime without any configuration information. This paper compares the development detail in the Abacus environment with that in the manual deployment environment, and evaluates our deployment approach accordingly. On the one hand, this approach frees maintainers from annoying deployment work at low-level, which helps to enhance the productivity in building grid applications. On the other hand, this approach allows services to be deployed according to the application logic, helping to improve the utilization and the management of various grid resources.