WebSphere Application Server supports asynchronous messaging as a method of communication based on the JMS and JCA programming interfaces. These interfaces provide a common way for Java programs (clients and J2EE applications) to create, send, receive, and read asynchronous requests, as messages.
Besides using the programming interfaces directly to explicitly poll for messages, WAS also supports the use of message-driven beans as asynchronous message consumers. A message-driven bean is invoked by the EJB container when a message arrives at the destination that it is configured to listen on, without an application having to explicitly poll the destination.
To handle non-JMS requests inbound to WAS from enterprise information systems, message-driven beans use a JCA 1.5 resource adapter written for that purpose. In the JCA 1.5 specification, such message-driven beans are commonly called message endpoints or simply endpoints.
Message-driven beans that implement the interface...
javax.jms.MessageListener
...can be used for JMS messaging. For JMS messaging, message-driven beans can use a JMS provider that has a JCA 1.5 resource adapter, such as the default messaging provider that is part of WAS v6.
With a JCA 1.5 resource adapter, you deploy EJB 2.1 message-driven beans as JCA resources to use a J2C activation specification. If a JMS provider does not have a JCA 1.5 resource adapter, such as the V5 Default Messaging and WebSphere MQ, configure JMS message-driven beans against a listener port (as in WAS v5).
You can use the WebSphere administrative console to administer the WAS support for asynchronous messaging. For example, you can configure JCA resource adapters, J2C activation specifications, JMS providers, and JMS resources, and can control the activity of messaging services.
Related concepts
Using a JNDI namespace to connect to different JMS provider environments
Related tasks
Learning about the default messaging provider
Related reference
JMS
interfaces
Related information
http://java.sun.com/products/jms/docs.html