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 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
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.