Support for configuring and using message-driven beans (MDBs) through JMS listener ports is deprecated.
I would like to attempt to put peoples minds at rest here by explaining the motivation behind the deprecation.
When J2EE 1.3 was released it added in message driven beans support, but without specifying how this should work. So we invented listener ports (WAS v5). Then J2EE 1.4 came a long and told us how it should work. It introduced this new mechanism called "activation specifications" which are part of a resource adapter. So we went ahead and implemented activation specifications (WAS v6), but we still maintained listener ports as this was still how we integrated WebSphere MQ as a JMS provider into message driven beans.
More recently we released a resource adapter for WebSphere MQ and in WAS v7 we integrated this into WAS as the way to integrate WebSphere MQ with MDBs. As a result we now have two ways to do the exact same thing. Having two ways of doing things often causes confusion because people want to know which they should use. In general we want our answer to be to use activation specifications. There are lots of good things about activation specifications, like being able to define them once for a cluster, rather than once per cluster member, so in an effort to avoid confusion we deprecated listener ports.
While this is good for new application developers, as they have a clear direction on which to use. It is not so good for existing users of listener ports who might worry that the rug is being pulled out from under them. So for those people who are using listener ports, don't worry we have no plans to remove them from the product. They are there for the foreseeable future.
For those who are happy to migrate we have endeavoured to make this as simple as possible, and applications do not need to be re-written to take advantage of activation specifications, they do not even need to be redeployed, a simple change to the message listener bindings followed by a restart of the application is all that is needed. We even have a nice whizzy button to convert a listener port to an activation specification.
So in summary, if you are writing new applications then we recommend that you use activation specifications, for existing applications then don't worry - listener ports are still there, and we won't be getting rid of them for some time to come. I wouldn't want anyone to worry that a crack team of IBM engineers will blast a hole in their data centres to surgically remove the listener ports from their product.
Alasdair
