Message-Driven Beans

Message-driven beans are another new feature introduced by the EJB 2.0 architecture. Message-driven beans are transaction-aware components that process asynchronous messages delivered through the Java Message Service (JMS). The JMS API is an integral part of the Java EE platform.

Asynchronous messaging allows applications to communicate by exchanging messages so that senders are independent of receivers. The sender sends its message and does not have to wait for the receiver to receive or process that message. This differs from synchronous communication, which requires the component that is invoking a method on another component to wait or block until the processing completes and control returns to the caller component.