Distribution is one of the essential features characterizing multi-agent systems (MASs), giving developers the opportunity to seamlessly conceive and then engineer a physically distributed application as a MAS spread among different network nodes. Nevertheless, the current support given by state-of-the-art Agent Programming Languages (APLs) and related platforms for programming distributed multi-agent systems as well as for handling distribution when deploying, running, debugging the distributed MAS is still quite primitive. In this paper we tackle this problem by introducing simpAL, a new agent-oriented programming language and platform which has been conceived from the beginning to provide a more comprehensive support for programming, deploying and executing physically distributed MASs.