A prescriptive architecture for application development is provided. In some embodiments, the architecture comprises a service, a receiver, a sender, and a transport. The service functions to perform the actual business logic, is decorated with service deployment metadata; and is operable to communicate via types. The receiver is coupled to the service and is generated entirely from the service deployment metadata. The receiver is operable to receive messages, convert the received messages into types, and communicate with the service using the types. The sender is coupled to the receiver and is generated entirely from the service deployment metadata. The sender functions as a proxy for the service to a service consumer, and is operable to communicate using types with the service consumer. The sender is operable to convert the types to messages, and communicate with the receiver via messages. The transport functions as a message exchange technology that allows the sender and receiver to communicate, and is designated by the service deployment metadata and implemented as an underlying technology of the sender and the receiver.