Developing Java applications for MQ just got easier with Maven

Introduction

This post talks about a simpler way to develop Java applications for MQ, using a Maven repository to automatically install dependencies.

Application development for MQ requires access to the language-specific interfaces, libraries, headers, DLLs etc. You write an application and, depending on the language, the MQ-provided components are used within the IDE while you are writing code, checked during build processes, or referenced at runtime. If you want to make your application available to other people, then they will need access to at least the runtime MQ interfaces.

We made it much easier to distribute applications with the release of the MQ Redistributable Client packages.

And now we’ve also made it easier to write Java applications, so that you do not need to explicitly install anything before using MQ’s interfaces.

See more about setting up dependencies for your Java program

IBM MQ and Node.js

A new way to develop MQ programs running in Node

MQ has always supported a wide range of API styles, languages and environments to enable applications to be written in whichever way a developer feels at home. There is the full-function procedural API, often called from C or Cobol programs; object-oriented varieties of that interface such as for Java and C#; and there is the JMS model.

One of my previous projects involved creation of a  Go binding for MQ. There are client APIs and protocols with simpler interfaces that can also connect to MQ, such as MQ Light and MQTT. And there are more than just these examples – the new REST messaging API is yet another. One environment where a lot of new applications are developed is Node.js, with JavaScript being the associated programming language.

And so, as part of making it easy for people to access MQ from Node, I’ve now published a JavaScript API implementation on github.

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Adding resource statistics to your applications

MQ V9 added resource monitoring statistics that you can subscribe to. In this post I’m going to show how you can generate similar statistics from your own applications using the same model. For example, you may want to track how many successful and how many failed messages are being processed.

See how to add statistics generation to your applications

IBM MQ and Salesforce messaging

IBM and Salesforce recently announced a partnership to deliver various solutions based around the different companies products.

As part of that initiative, MQ is now shipping a component that enables MQ applications to receive events caused by updates to Salesforce data, or driven by applications running in the Salesforce environment.

This new bridge, an optionally installable element of MQ V9.0.2 on the x64 Linux product, listens for these events and republishes them to MQ topics. Any MQ application using the normal publish/subscribe programming interfaces can get these messages, and then take action based on the contents. One of those MQ applications could be IIB, which has a node for Salesforce integration, allowing further work with that Salesforce data to be triggered through a message flow.

Along with this re-publication, the bridge program also contributes monitoring data to show how much traffic is being processed. The MQ Console can show this in its graph widgets:

There is an accompanying demo video to go with this post that shows the whole thing working

MQ on Linux comes of age!

In something a bit different, I’ve decided to look back in time. That’s because, while digging through some old files recently, I realised that IBM MQ on Linux is

21 years old today.

SupportPac MA57, as far as I can find, made MQ the first IBM product to have any kind of public support for Linux and was released on 1 Feb 1996. There might have been some research projects or tools before then, and there were certainly other products considering options, (my email archives suggest that several corporate lawyers rapidly got involved, as IBM got to grips with GPL and other open source licenses) but I don’t remember anything else officially released at the time.
Read about SupportPac MA57

Formatting MQ Events as JSON

IBM MQ has always been able to generate event messages when something “interesting” has occurred in the queue manager. These events could be showing that a queue is full, or that there has been an authorisation failure; someone needing an audit trail might want to capture the command and configuration events. These events are written as MQ messages to well-known queues, using PCF structures which can be decoded to give the full description of the event.

See how these events can now be fed to JSON-aware processors

Calling IBM MQ from Go applications

Go is a language created at Google and made available as an open-source project. Although originally designed for building reliable large-scale distributed applications, its general-purpose nature and the collection of interface packages provided in the core language and from other projects has helped it become popular for a much broader set of applications.

In this article, I’ll show how Go programs can make use of IBM MQ, permitting Go applications access to the services provided by MQ-enabled applications, with an API that is more natural for Go programmers than some of the elements in MQ’s C API.

Find out how to use the MQI bindings for Golang

IBM MQ – Using Active Directory for authorisation in Unix queue managers

Permissions for accessing MQ functions have traditionally relied on using operating system definitions for users and groups. That could mean you having a requirement to define those users and groups on each system individually, which is challenging enough in a static topology, but becomes even worse in a dynamic environment such as a cloud where systems may be being defined and deleted regularly. And so some central definition of the identities becomes essential.
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IBM MQ – Further integration with open-source monitors

An earlier blog entry showed how to integrate MQ with the Prometheus database, capturing statistics that can then be shown in a Grafana dashboard. In this article, I’ll show how that initial work has been extended to work with more databases and collection tools.

The latest updates allow MQ to write directly to InfluxDB and OpenTSDB databases, and also to provide data to collectd.

Continue reading “IBM MQ – Further integration with open-source monitors”