A method for of authoring and executing stateful components for a distributed application is disclosed. An application schema for the distributed application is declaratively defined and includes a plurality of distributed modules. Each module hosts a set of stateful components co-located in a physical tier of a distributed environment having logic to manipulate state. The runtime supports partitioning the stateful components. Control flow opaqueness of component logic is banished in each of the stateful components, which would otherwise occur if state was externalized.