1. A system for providing a protocol-neutral application server for developing telecommunications-based applications, said system comprising: an event broker operating on one or more microprocessors and memory; a set of protocol adapters, each protocol adapter implementing input and output operations towards a specific protocol and producing protocol-inbound asynchronous events to the event broker and consuming protocol-outbound asynchronous events from the event broker; wherein the event broker maps all protocol-specific communications exposed by said set of protocol adapters into asynchronous events; a plurality of application components wherein each application component consumes protocol-inbound asynchronous events from the event broker and produces protocol-outbound asynchronous events to the event broker, such that all communications between each application component and each of said set of protocol adapters are made through asynchronous events via the event broker and are decoupled from protocol-specific semantics; a plurality of actors, wherein each actor includes one or more of said application components, and wherein said plurality of actors is adapted to be instantiated as a plurality of actor instances; each of said plurality of actor instances being an exclusive owner of a segment of state assigned to the actor instance; and wherein a first actor instance of said plurality of actor instances may only communicate with a second actor instance of said plurality of actor instances by transmitting actor-to-actor asynchronous events to said event broker, which actor-to-actor asynchronous events are then received directly from said event broker by said second actor instance.