IBM Message Queue Interface
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IBM WebSphere MQ is a network communication technology launched by IBM in March 1992. It was previously known as MQSeries, which is a trademark that was rebranded by IBM in 2002 to join the suite of WebSphere products. WebSphere MQ is IBM's Message Oriented Middleware offering. It allows independent and potentially non-concurrent applications on a distributed system to communicate with each other. MQ is available on a large number of platforms (both IBM and non-IBM), including z/OS (mainframe), Unix (AIX, Linux, HP-UX, Solaris) and Windows.
There are two parts to message queueing:
- Messages are collections of binary data that have some meaning to a participating program. As in other communications protocols, storage, routing, and delivery information is added to the message before transmission and stripped from the message prior to delivery to the receiving application.
- Message queues are objects that store messages in an application.
A Queue Manager is a system service that provides an Application Programming Interface for the message queue and can transfer messages to other queue managers via message channels.
There are several advantages to this technology:
- Messages do not depend on pure packet-based transmissions, such as TCP/IP. This allows the sending and receiving ends to be decoupled and potentially operate asynchronously.
- Sufficiently important messages will be delivered once and once only, irrespective of errors and network problems.
APIs
There are many ways to access WebSphere MQ's facilities. Some of the APIs supported by IBM are:
There are many other unsupported APIs of which the most notable is the Perl interface, available from CPAN [1]
Awards
In 2004 WebSphere MQ won the Royal Academy of Engineering's [2] MacRobert prize [3] for technological and engineering innovation [4].
