What’s up with MQ?

I haven’t blogged about my core work for a while, so it’s probably about time. This is a bit of a round-up of some of the things I’ve observed happening around in the MQ space lately.

WebSphere MQ stuff

It’s a year of anniversaries. Apart from IBM Hursley hitting 50 (reminding me that I’ve yet to post my Spitfire photos from the celebratory open day weekend), IBM Warwick is 30 and WebSphere is celebrating 10 years. WebSphere MQ was formerly called MQSeries, of course, and has been around a few years longer than the “parent” brand, with a 15th birthday this year.

I’m sure the numbering is merely a coincidence, but there’s a good article on IBM developerWorks entitled The top 15 WebSphere MQ best practices.

WMQ reached version 7 this year. I had some very positive experiences with the alpha version of the product last year, although I’ve not yet had a play with the GA release. The new HTTP support is particularly interesting from a Web 2.0 perspective, and I keep meaning to build some demos around that that feature.

In related news, WebSphere MQ now has a Twitter account, so if you want to catch the latest news and announcements you might want to follow that.

I picked that last nugget up from my friend and US colleague T.Rob Wyatt, who has been blogging for a while now… T.Rob is an expert who is absolutely worth following if you work in the MQ space. He’s also pointed out that there’s a new blog for IBM’s new Managed File Transfer product which was announced last month.

Other messaging-related notes

For some non-IBM messaging middleware updates, just to note that 0MQ (ZeroMQ) sounds intriguing (via Matt Perrins, who notes that it is nothing to do with Project Zero). I’ve done a lot of work with clients in the financial sector in particular, so I’ll be interested to see how this develops. One of the nice things about my other “pet” product, WebSphere Message Broker, is that it sits in the sweet spot of connectivity between different transports and protocols, so I guess I’ll be looking at how to make things talk to one another if 0MQ takes off.

Large files and WebSphere technologies

My friend and colleague Ben Thompson has been writing again – his latest developerWorks article Handling large files with WebSphere Transformation Extender has just been published. It describes a useful technique where a WTX map can be used to split a large file into multiple MQ messages each containing a single transaction, using the group header fields to keep the transactions together. Worth a read if you are interesting in processing these kinds of files.

Technorati tags: WebSphere, WTX, WebSphere Transformation Extender, MQ, WebSphere MQ, WMQ, files, developerWorks, Ben Thompson

Hostnames and MQ Explorer

I haven’t blogged about my day job for a while, but an interesting technical issue came up today.

A customer was trying to add a new queue manager to MQ Explorer. However, they could not enter the hostname into the relevant field in the GUI.

It turned out that the hostname had_an_underscore character in it. The entry field in MQ Explorer prevents the user from entering this character.

This restriction makes sense. As per several RFCs (RFC952, RFC1035, RFC1178) and the Wikipedia entry on hostnames, underscores_are_not_valid characters in hostnames.

… hostname labels can only be made up of the ASCII letters ‘a’ through ‘z’ (case-insensitive), the digits ‘0′ through ‘9′, and the hyphen. Labels can not start nor end with a hyphen. Special characters other than the hyphen (and the dot between labels) are not allowed, although they are sometimes used anyway. Underscore characters are commonly used by Windows systems but according to RFC 952 they are not allowed…

So, now you know.

A solution could be to reference the IP address of the queue manager in question, or possibly to alias the hostname in the hosts file so that it does not contain underscores. Note that I have not tested the latter solution, but it should work.

Technorati tags: MQ, IBM, WebSphere MQ, WMQ, MQ Explorer, GUI, hostname, RFC, IP address

Amazon SQS – some of us queue already…

I became aware of Amazon Simple Queue Service early last year. I haven’t had much of a chance to do anything with it beyond playing with demos. I thought I’d written about it, but can’t find the previous entry I believed I’d posted!

Over on the Amazon Web Services blog, there’s a very good post describing message queueing, and why asynchronous communication is a good thing. Choice snippet:

Queuing allows and encourages applications to become truly service-oriented. You will be automatically making the right architecture decision of making your applications service-oriented and independent to others.

Not only that, but some people seem to feel that the platform that Amazon have been building is pretty impressive. I don’t disagree.

Time for another look, I think. I’ve been dealing with message-oriented middleware for the best part of 7 years now, primarily with WebSphere MQ, and I’ve looked at a couple of the alternatives… the main issue I have with SQS in particular is the use of HTTP as the transport, but that makes some sense in the WOA view of the world. I’ll have to dig deeper.

Technorati tags: Amazon, AWS, SQS, MOM, MQ, messaging, middleware, WOA, queueing

End of a (shortish) era

Just finished working on what was, for me, a relatively long client engagement – 9 months in London. It was a very interesting piece of work building an ESB using WebSphere Message Broker, WebSphere MQ, WebSphere Process Server, and adapters, all running on Sun Solaris. I had the opportunity to work with a cool team, including individuals from other vendors, and I learned a lot – and equally, I hope that others were able to learn from me, since that is what I was there for! Good luck to the team.

Pastures new from tomorrow – it looks to be a busy month, with Blue Fusion coming up too. I’ll be taking some time out in March as well.

I’ll also miss my daily Starbucks – the staff were very friendly – hope to drop back in and say hello to them in the future.

Technorati tags: WebSphere Message Broker, WebSphere Process Server, Solaris, WebSphere MQ, work, Starbucks, Blue Fusion, IBM, SOA, ESB

Hursley blogs on WMQ

Very glad to see that Dale has got the new blog up-and-running. A Hursley View on WMQ aims to provide an additional communications channel from the development team in the labs (IBM Hursley near Winchester in the UK, in the case of WebSphere MQ). Look out for tips, news on tools, and posts about “how it works”.

It is important to note that the blog doesn’t replace the existing newsgroups or unofficial third-party discussion sites, and it also doesn’t replace the formal product support process. However, I think it is going to be interesting to watch – there are already some interesting posts up which cover details that I was not aware of.

I’ve added it to my blogroll and feedreader already. If you’re a techie like me and work with WebSphere MQ, you should do the same.

Technorati tags: IBM, Hursley, WebSphere MQ, WMQ, messaging, developers, Dale Lane, middleware

SAM – messaging from PHP

I just saw that  the Simple Asynchronous Messaging (SAM) project was announced on the ibm.software.websphere.mq newsgroup (which doesn’t appear in Google Groups, for some reason). It looks like it was originally announced on the PHP groups a few weeks ago.

I’ve not had much of a chance to look at this yet, but the idea of the project is to enable PHP developers to connect to WebSphere MQ, WebSphere Message Broker and the WebSphere Application Server v6 messaging provider. Looks great – I shall have to research it further.

Technorati tags: MQ, PHP, WebSphere, SAM, Simple Asynchronous Messaging

Coming up: new stuff for WMB

We just announced some goodness around WebSphere Message Broker. In particular, there’s a set of ease-of-use enhancements to the toolkit and some new functionality for Web Services.

It all looks very exciting indeed. Should arrive just in time for Christmas

In the meantime, take a look at all this other stuff:

• There are new SOAP nodes available in SupportPac IA9O, which will work with the new function in the toolkit.
• A new version of the WMB Administrator Eclipse plugin is available.
• SupportPac MR01 describes how to setup an HA Link from WMQ to the WebSphere SIBus.
• Check the new RedPaper on SSL with WMQ and WMB.

Technorati tags: WebSphere, Broker, WebSphere Message Broker, WMB, WMQ, SupportPac, SSL, IBM, Redbook, SIBus, Eclipse

Changing daylight saving time

Bobby Woolf notes that the US is changing the cycle of Daylight Saving Time in 2007.

This change affects my favourite product. The details are in this Technote. Basically, the Java VM needs to be upgraded, and certain MRM message sets will also be affected - a new fixpack will become available in advance of March 2007 when the DST change comes into effect.

Worth noting that WebSphere MQ may be partially affected, too… in this case it is just the JVM which may be an issue, not MQ or the MQ Java or JMS classes themselves.

Of course, whether this DST change will have a significant impact on US energy usage is a debatable point…

Technorati tags: DST, WebSphere, WebSphere Message Broker, MRM, JVM, Java fixpack, WMB, broker, MQ, WMQ, WebSphere MQ

Analysing blog search hits

One of the nice features that WordPress provides me as a blog owner is the ability to find out what search terms people have been using to find my blog. I check these fairly frequently, as they serve as a good guide to what the world finds interesting in my writing!

Here are some examples from the past seven days, and my comments on the search terms where relevant.

downloads for tomtom 910 This, or or some similar phrase about the TomTom GO 910, seems to appear in my search hits regularly. Clearly the fact that I have one is of great interest. I do have posts about my experiences with it, but the most popular post on my blog appears to be TomTom 910, still waiting – which dates from before I even owned one.

www.direct.gov.car tax / car tax online These are related to my second most popular post, from months and months ago, when I happened to mention that I thought the online renewal system for UK car tax appeared to work. I find it remarkable that I get so many hits from this single post.

sametime 7.5 messages truncate Fantastic to see that Sametime 7.5 has generated so much buzz, and that people have been coming to my blog to find out more. This particular search is somewhat worrying, as it implies that someone was having a problem with it. I’d love to know more about that.

Talking of Sametime 7.5, have you checked out the new developerWorks article on the location awareness feature?

marwellzoo pics and photos to copy Hmm. I’m not sure that I want people copying my photos, especially without asking. Presumably whoever ran this search will have found my photos. I wonder if they have used them in some way.

eclipse websphere message flows esql tut I assume that the last word was “tutorial”. I don’t have an ESQL tutorial here. Perhaps I should write one.

blue screen vmware Amazing, I only posted about my VMWare problems last weekend. Good to see search engines are keeping up.

amqsput source code For future reference, the source code for the amqsput program is in the C:\Program Files\IBM\WebSphere MQ\Tools\samples\c directory on Windows, or /opt/mqm/samp (or /usr/mqm/samp) on UNIX platforms. Assuming that you installed the samples, of course.

mq broker esb lacking Again, I would love to know what issues the person who ran this search was having. I wish they had commented somewhere to explain – sounds like the kind of dialogue that I’d be interested in engaging in. Just what did they feel that WebSphere Message Broker was lacking?

who has a bank holiday on 11th september I have no idea. Do I? No that was going to be the train drivers, but the strike has been called off.

photography for newsprint Hmm, this person will have been disappointed, nothing about photography there.

These represent just a tiny sample. I’m continually fascinated by the ways in which the content of my blog is being used. I could have made this post much longer. In general though, I’m satisfied that the majority of my posts – particularly the technical ones – seem to attract interest. Lots of interest in MQ and Broker related posts, and that’s one of the reasons that I’m here.

I should note that WordPress doesn’t provide me with any visibility of which search engines were actually used – just the terms. This is fine, but again sometimes I’m nosy and just want to know! I’ve sometimes gone as far as running the searches through the search engines to see how high up the list my posts come – I’m impressed when people have had to go reasonably far down the list (second or third page) and still visited my site!