1. A system for providing a protocol-neutral application server for developing telecommunications-based applications, said system comprising: at least one application component; a set of protocol adapters, each protocol adapter implementing input and output operations towards a specific protocol; and an event broker that maps all protocol-specific communications exposed by the set of protocol adapters into asynchronous events, wherein the application component consumes protocol-inbound asynchronous events from the protocol adapters and produces protocol-outbound asynchronous events to the protocol adapters, such that all communications by the application component are decoupled from protocol-specific semantics.