Message-driven beans, activation specifications, and listener ports

Guidelines, related to versions of WebSphere® Application Server, to help you choose when to configure your message-driven beans to work with listener ports rather than activation specifications.

You can configure the following resources for message-driven beans:

Activation specifications are the standardized way to manage and configure the relationship between an MDB running in WebSphere Application Server and a destination in WebSphere MQ. They combine the configuration of connectivity, the Java Message Service (JMS) destination and the runtime characteristics of the MDB, within a single object.

Activation specifications supersede the use of listener ports, which became a stabilized feature in WebSphere Application Server Version 7.0 (for more information, see Stabilized features). There are several advantages to using activation specifications over listener ports:

For WebSphere Application Server Version 7 and later, listener ports are stabilized. For more information, read the article on stabilized features. You should 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. Here are some guidelines, related to versions of WebSphere Application Server, to help you choose when to use listener ports rather than activation specifications:

To assist in migrating listener ports to activation specifications, the WebSphere Application Server administrative console provides a Convert listener port to activation specification wizard on the Message listener port collection panel. This allows you to convert existing listener ports into activation specifications. However, this function only creates a new activation specification with the same configuration used by the listener port. It does not modify application deployments to use the newly created activation specification.

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Last updated: April 20, 2014 08:46 PM CDT
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