Administering listener ports
You can use the WebSphere® Application Server administrative console to administer listener ports, which each define the association between a connection factory, a destination, and a message-driven bean.
Before you begin
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 IBM 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.
For more information about when to use listener ports rather than activation specifications, see Message-driven beans, activation specifications, and listener ports.
Before configuring message listener resources, consider the message listener service implementation on the z/OS® platform, which affects how you should configure your listener port. For more information, see
Message listener service on z/OS.
About this task
A listener port defines the association between a connection factory, a destination, and a deployed message-driven bean. If you set the initial state of a listener port to Started, the listener port is started automatically when a message-driven bean associated with that port is installed.
Listener ports can be manually started and stopped. If a message-driven bean fails to process a message several times, the listener port is automatically stopped by the application server. When a listener port is stopped, the listener manager stops the listeners for all message-driven beans associated with the port. Consequently, the associated message-driven beans can no longer process messages.