A gateway (1) has a platform on which resides a CORBA bus (22) an inner layer (23) of Parlay APIs, and an outer layer (24) of network service interfaces for controlling network resources (2). The gateway (1) also comprises application interfaces (20) and Parlay APIs (21) residing on remote platforms which also host applications (10, 13, 14) wishing to access the network resources (2). The network resources (2) interface directly with the Parlay APIs (23) if they have Parlay APIs themselves, or otherwise with the interfaces (24). On the application side, the application interfaces (20) are provided as Java Beans which may be instantiated by an XML interpreter in response to high level XML commands defining application-side interfacing requirements.