The paper describes a Corba components based service development environment and reports important lessons learned from service design, implementation and usage. A declared project goal was to evaluate service programmability, speed and flexibility in the creation of complex services based on simple building blocks. We implemented an OSA/Parlay gateway with a Parlay call control interface to control a SIP Proxy. A Parlay Framework performs registration, trust and security, discovery, service agreement management, service profiling and subscription tasks. The software is implemented in Java using Corba components (CCM). User profiling and service chaining possibilities are extensively used in a complex scenario including external voice server, web based groupware and call setup functionality provided via Parlay APIs.