WARP4 is based on a three tiers software architecture whose main elements are:

• A GUI written in C# which can be run onto any platform supporting Microsoft .NET.
• An application server, e.g. Tomcat, to host the Web Services used to interface, via RMI, the WARP4 Server.
• The WARP4 server that is 100% pure Java able to run on any platform supporting Java2 1.4.
  

The high level WARP4 software architecture is sketched out in the following picture:

WARP4 provides a complete set of APIs enabling the effective access both to its own rating and authorization functions, in which the highest processing speed is achieved with an extremely low latency, and to its own configuration and management functions, in which the seamless accessibility is required.
In order to achieve such a goal, the following technologies have been used:

• Web Services
  Web Services is a new way in which a service can be delivered over a network. It is a W3C standard and is based on HTTP, SOAP and XML. This new standard gives any vendor the chance to publish a set of services that virtually anyone can easily access from anywhere (Internet, Extranet and Intranet). WARP4 uses Web Services to provide the access to its configuration and management functions. The main clients of this interface are the WARP4 Graphical User Interface and the external provisioning system. Because Web Services is based on HTTP it inherits all the security features of the protocol like SSL and the seamless integration in any network configuration without the need to reconfigure firewalls to support proprietary protocols.
  
• RMI
  RMI stands for Remote Method Invocation and it represents the standard way a Java application can access a remote Java class. WARP4 provides RMI APIs for managing the entire set of the rating and authorization functions on its own Java server.
  
• LUX4
  LUX4 is a dedicated protocol for high performance communications developed by ERIS4 to provide an efficient access to the network relevant set of WARP4 rating and authorization functions. LUX4 has been designed in order to get the best performance and easiest integration with an external system. The client-side library is pure Java and provides several internal optimizations in order to get the most from the network connection used like transparent requests aggregation.