Today, the choice for a particular programming language limits the alternative products that can be used to deploy the program. The purpose of this work is to break the strong ties between programming languages and runtime environments and thus make it possible to innovate at both ends independently. While this goal has been pursued in previous work, the specific focus of this work is on Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs); focusing on this domain and its particular properties makes it possible to achieve this goal with affordable efforts. The key idea is to introduce a Service Language Layer (SLL) which gives a high-level abstraction of a service-oriented program and which can easily and efficiently be executed on alternative Web Services platforms.