The disclosed embodiments relate to a system that facilitates developing applications in a component-based software development environment. This system provides an execution environment comprising instances of application components and a registry that maps names to instances of application components. Upon receiving a call to register a mapping between a name and an instance of an application component, the system updates the registry to include an entry for the mapping. Moreover, upon receiving a call to be notified about registry changes for a name, the system updates the registry to send a notification to a caller when a registry change occurs for the name.