Managing message listener resources for message-driven beans
Manage the resources used by the message listener service to support message-driven beans, typically for use with a messaging provider that does not have a Java™ EE Connector Architecture (JCA) 1.5 resource adapter.
Before you begin
For WebSphere® Application Server Version 7 and later, listener ports are stabilized. For more information, read the topic about stabilized features. Plan to migrate your WebSphere MQ message-driven bean deployment configurations from using listener ports to using activation specifications. However, you should not begin this migration until you are sure the application does not have to work on application servers earlier than WebSphere Application Server Version 7. For example, if you have an application server cluster with some members at Version 6.1 and some at a later version, you should not migrate applications on that cluster to use activation specifications until after you migrate all the application servers in the cluster to the later version. Also, when you migrate to activation specifications on the z/OS® platform, you must enable the Control Region Adjunct (CRA) process of the application server (either by selecting Enable JCA based inbound message delivery on the JMS provider settings panel, or by using the manageWMQ command to include starting the CRA process as part of starting an application server).
If you want to use message-driven beans with a messaging provider that does not have a JCA Version 1.5 or 1.6 resource adapter, you cannot use activation specifications and therefore you must configure your beans against a listener port. There are also a few scenarios in which, although you could use activation specifications, you might still choose to use listener ports. For example, for compatibility with existing message-driven bean applications.
If you have existing message-driven beans that use the WebSphere MQ messaging provider (or a compliant third-party JMS provider) with listener ports, and instead you want to use EJB 3 message-driven beans with listener ports, these new beans can continue to use the same messaging provider.
About this task
The message listener service is an extension to the JMS functions of the JMS provider and provides a listener manager, which controls and monitors one or more JMS listeners. Each listener monitors either a JMS queue destination (for point-to-point messaging) or a JMS topic destination (for publish/subscribe messaging). A listener port defines the association between a connection factory, a destination, and a deployed message-driven bean. When you deploy a message-driven bean, you associate the bean with a listener port. When a message arrives on the destination, the listener passes the message to a new instance of a message-driven bean for processing.