New features of WebSphere MQ V6

Introduction: This article describes some of the major enhancements to WebSphere MQ Version 6. Other references are listed to help you learn more about WebSphere MQ basic products and their characteristics.

What is WebSphere MQ?

WEBSPHERE®MQ provides a simple solution for the organization's connectivity requirements and serves as a basis for building and developing integrated solutions. WebSphere MQ allows you to easily exchange information between many different platforms and environments-integrating new and existing business applications. It provides reliable data delivery and allows application developers to build complex recovery and error-handling logic in their applications.

This article focuses on several areas of interest to applications and system developers in WebSphere MQ V6. Many other features that are more related to the system administrator are briefly described.

New features and enhancements for WebSphere MQ V6

Version 6 contains the following features and enhancements.

Configuration Tool

The WebSphere MQ V6 has a new graphical configuration tool to replace the graphical user interface (GUI) in the WebSphere MQ V5.3, which runs only in the Microsoft Management Console. Now you no longer need to use Windows® computers for that GUI; the WebSphere MQ V6 implementation is based on the ECLIPSE framework and is supported on both Windows and Linux operating systems. There are a number of benefits to using eclipse-one of the benefits is that it can be run on a variety of operating systems and can be integrated with other products that use Eclipse for application development or management.

At the time of publication, the WebSphere MQ V6 GUI repeated features from the Microsoft Management Console (MMC version) and expanded it in many ways. One of the extensions is that it can now manage a z/OS queue Manager. The managed Queue Manager does not have to run WebSphere MQ V6 on a platform other than z/OS. The tool can also manage the older versions of WebSphere MQ and MQSeries on the distributed platform. Other new Queue manager operations, such as extended status reports, are also available from this GUI, which we'll discuss later.

Figure 1. WebSphere MQ V6 Configuration Tool

Extensibility of the Eclipse Configuration tool

The GUI is implemented as an Eclipse plug-in, which itself can be extended by writing a new plug-in. The Eclipse interface for Plug-ins includes methods that are common to all plug-ins and provide a standard way in which each plug-in can expose additional functionality. The WebSphere MQ GUI includes a documented interface to allow third parties to add their own menu items to a menu, such as a menu item that appears when you press the right mouse button when you view a queue. It also provides sample plug-ins in both source and binary format to show how to comply with the standard Eclipse methods.

WEB Services

The WebSphere MQ V6 contains a component that enables WEB services to run at the WebSphere MQ Transport layer, rather than on top of the HTTP protocol, as is more often the case. Thus, the SOAP content of a WEB service request can be transmitted through a reliable protocol before it is submitted to the server program. The process of transferring using WebSphere MQ is completely transparent to the application code. When you deploy a service component, you can select the WebSphere MQ transport by defining an appropriate URI. WebSphere MQ provides support for the Axis and. Net environments and will interoperate with the new CICS Web service Gateway.

This also provides the basis for future work around asynchronous WEB services. Because of the development and clarity of standards, WebSphere MQ is expected to increase the use of common asynchronous transmissions.