11 replies to this topic

[Mike Nicholson]

Just wondering if anybody has successfully integrated MQ series into the ProIV kernel.

It's being investigated here and before we get to the proof of concept stage (as this requires new MQ licenses on the ProIV machines) I thought I'd just make sure nobody had any horror stories

Cheers

Mike

[Neil Hunter]

For those of us that are not on the same page , what is MQ ?

[Mike Nicholson]

It's IBM's messaging package.

Sorry, I should probably have stated that but I figured if people didn't know what it was they probably hadn't put it in the kernel.

You never know though on some sites

Cheers

Mike

[Neil Hunter]

Nope, sorry

[Richard Bassett]

I've integrated Oracle/AQ stuff into the kernel. The application in question already used MQ as well but not via kernel integration. I see no reason you'd have a particular problem integrating MQ with the kernel. In fact I "abstracted" the AQ stuff I did to allow for support of multiple IPC mechanisms.
ISTR MQ has a choice of more than one API. Although it might look like more work at the outset, I've often found it worthwhile to choose a lower-level API for this kind of work as it gives more "room to manoeuvre" in case of unexpected little showstoppers..

[Los Rouse]

Mainframe PRO IV (Version 5) supports MQ as supplied. Maybe none mainframe PRO IV will have MQ support in the near future? It might be worth checking.

[Dan Shannon]

Richard

Of course there's absolutely NO NEED to integrate AQ into the kernel, since it has a PL/SQL API that works perfectly well using SYS-SQL.

As for MQ, last time I used it, it was definitely in the realms of 'black art'. But then that was 10 years ago

Cheers

Dan

[Marlon]

We went the route of writing an external C program that reads from MQ and loads into an Oracle table, and read from the Oracle table within ProIV. Similarly, we write to another Oracle table from within ProIV, then read from that with another C program and output to MQ to produce our outgoing messages.

[Mike Nicholson]

Thanks for the responses guys. It's still at the theoretical stage at the moment - I was just wondering if it had been done and whether there were any major issues.

Judging from the responses it looks like it's a valid option for us.

Cheers

Mike

[Richard Bassett]

Of course there's absolutely NO NEED to integrate AQ into the kernel, since it has a PL/SQL API that works perfectly well using SYS-SQL.

Unless of course you have an app that already uses message queueing extensively and supports several other queueing mechanisms via the kernel.. and you want to be able to substitute Oracle/AQ with no changes to the code

Also, I'm not really clear how one could read a message from a queue using SYS-SQL ?

[Dan Shannon]

I'm not really clear how one could read a message from a queue using SYS-SQL

Well, depends on how you're set up... of course I wouldn't actually attempt to use the AQ API directly, ever, as it's pretty ordinary from a PRO-IV application programmer's point of view. We put a bunch of wrapper code in PL/SQL around the AQ stuff, to make it dump message content direct into Oracle tables and then read from there into PRO-IV, because that's the way PRO-IV really likes to play.

If I were to do it again, I'd just use JMS queues and the Spring framework JMS gear, plus Hibernate, to do it instead. Config files, 10 lines of code, instant messaging! (Not IM though )