A message driven bean is a particular EJB that allows enterprise applications to process asynchronous messages. This type of bean usually works as a JMS message listener, which is an event listener with the difference that it receives JMS messages instead of events.
More details on the message listener are in Chapter 8, Working with Messaging, in the Message listeners section.
The messages are usually sent by any Java EE components as a web component, an application client, another enterprise bean, and a JMS application, but also by systems that do not work with Java EE technology. Message driven beans can process JMS messages or other types of messages. Here's a sample of message driven bean:
@MessageDriven(mappedName = "jms/queue", activationConfig = {
@ActivationConfigProperty(propertyName = "destination", propertyValue = "...