1. An electronic business support system, comprising a smart component server, wherein said smart component server comprises: a plurality of activity smart components, each of which performs a specific business logic; a plurality of service smart components which provide common infrastructure capabilities required by said activity smart components; a plurality of communications messaging interfaces that transport messages from said support system to external systems; a plurality of transport adapters, which facilitate connectivity with external systems; an administrator console, which is a Java-based tool that uses XML files to map object attributes to a database which is associated with said electronic business support system; wherein said smart components are implemented as stateless session enterprise Java beans.