About a year ago we released the EJB 3 Feature Pack for WebSphere Application Server v6.1. This introduced the EJB3 programming model for the first time, and many people rushed up and downloaded it for their application development. Some of the more eagle eyed people noticed a restriction. Message Driven Beans had to use activation specifications, no listener ports here. While this seems to be a simple restriction, when you realize that the only supported way of getting WebSphere MQ working with an MDB in v6.1 is with a listener port you realize the problem. The non-alignment of the release dates for the feature pack and the availability of activation specs in the Application Server led to an unforeseen gap. Oops you might say.
Without going into all the gory details we have been busy working on a solution and until now we have been able to say very little about what has been going on behind the scenes. Now things are different though we have published
APAR PK86005 EJB 3.0 MESSAGE-DRIVEN BEANS CANNOT BE USED WITH LISTENER PORTS. This APAR is targeted for inclusion in 6.1.0.25 (and 7.0.0.5) at which point you can bind an EJB3 MDB against a listener port, just like you could an EJB 2.1, or 2.0 MDB.
No code changes are needed to make this work, all you need to do is set the message listener bindings to name a listener port.
Alasdair
