How to use the WebSphere MQ FTE Ant and Best practices

Before you start

About this tutorial

This tutorial details the ant features and related commands and tasks provided by IBM WebSphere MQ FTE, and demonstrates how to develop an ant script based on the Eclipse platform for more powerful file transfer capabilities, and finally the best way to develop the FTE Ant task script Practice.

Goal

I hope that the reader through this tutorial can understand:

The ANT functionality provided in the WebSphere MQ FTE;

Develop the FTE Ant task script based on Eclipse;

Best practices for using FTE Ant

Prerequisite

This tutorial requires readers to understand the basic concepts, basic functionality, and basic operational steps of WebSphere MQ, WebSphere MQ FTE, and Apache Ant.

Objective

IBM WebSphere MQ file Transfer Edition (mqfte), combined with WebSphere MQ messaging solutions, provides managed file transfer capabilities to achieve the perfect unification of message transfer platforms and file transfer platforms, Gradually become the mainstream solution in the field of information transmission. An important extension of mqfte is the effective integration with Apache ant, which enriches and extends the integration capabilities and coverage of Mqfte file transfers by using ant scripts that enable Mqfte to perform more complex file transfer tasks using an interpreted scripting language.

Introduction to WebSphere MQ FTE Ant Features

ANT Introduction

Another Neat Tools (ANT) is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it's similar to make in (Unix) C, but it's different, and the ANT runtime requires an XML-formatted file that is not a Shell command file. Typically, users use ANT to build Java programs, including class libraries,. jar files,. war files, and so on. An Ant script is an XML file that contains a number of step tasks, such as creating a folder, invoking the Java compiler, passing compilation parameters, and so on.

Ant is a subproject in the JAKARTA directory of the Apache Software Foundation, and Ant is written in the pure Java language, so it is cross-platform and Ant is simple, consisting of a built-in task and optional task that requires only one XML file (build file) at runtime. Ant can execute various tasks by calling the target tree. Each task implements a specific interface object. Because the Ant build file is an XML-formatted file, it is easy to maintain and write, and the structure is clear. Ant is easy to integrate into some development environments because of its cross-platform nature and simple operation. For more information about Ant, please refer to [1].

WebSphere MQ FTE Ant Feature Overview

An important extension of mqfte is an effective integration with Apache ant, based on the Mqfte platform, where users perform more complex file transfer tasks with an interpreted scripting language using ant scripts, and usually the execution of each task relies on previous task execution. This is a very common requirement for managed file transfers. Based on the scalability of Apache ant, FTE ant extends the functionality of ant by creating a message that conforms to Mqfte and submits it to the FTE agent for complex file transfer tasks.