Message Interface into the J2EE world..

[Petran Bisschops]

Dear all,

We are currently faced with the problem that one of our (cobol) applications running on an Alpha DS10/OVMSV7.3-2 has to interface (messages in a-sync and sync mode) with a J2EE application running in an IBM Websphere server (WAS) environment. Company guideline enforces IBM MQ-series as the standard for messaging.

As far as I can see, I have 2 options:

1) Install MQ-Series V5.3 on the VMS box since a cobol interface is offered for this package.
Disadvantages might be A) cost of the MQ-series licenses b) On VMS only V5.3 of MQ-series are offered with little chance on ever upgrading the package. Our current WAS environment is using V6.0 an will be upgraded constantly so in the future, I have no guarantee that the VMS client can/will keep talking to the websphere version.

2) Build an adaptor based on the J2EE-JCA framework as an intermediate running on the IBM-WAS server, talking socket-IO to the VMS app and MQ to the J2EE app.

I have a few questions where I hope you would share your experience with me:

1) Has anybody done a thing like that?

2) Are there any other options I missed?

3) Has anybody ever used MQ series on VMS? Any pittfals?

4) Any other usefull comments?

Thanks in advance,

Petran Bisschops.

[Thomas Ritter]

We use MQ Client on VMS to talk to an MQ Server on MVS. The client is straight forward to use. Lots of C based examples which can be modified to suit. MQ client is free.
VMS verson 7.3-2. I'll have to check on the MQ client 5.* something.

Some setup issues with using logicals which were not documented. Basically a logical called mqserver has all the TCP/IP connection elements embedded. After 4 years of constant usage, no real issues.

We had no say in the selection of MQ client. The interface required connection to an IBM mainframe.