Rebol and message-oriented middlewares (Websphere MQ,...)

[deglingo]

Hi everybody,

In my company, I work a lot with IBM Websphere MQ. Lots of applications interact by putting messages on queues, and by consuming them.
As Rebol is supposed to be a "messaging" language and to interact easily with other systems, I would like to know if sthing has been implemented in Rebol in this field, the interaction with MOM (message-oriented middlewares), like a MQ / JMS client in JAVA, dealing with queue managers, queues, channels, being able to PUT a message on a MQ queue or to GET a message from a queue ?
It would be great, I could promote Rebol in my company and show its power.

If NOT, would it be difficult to define a new protocol in Rebol to handle that ? or to do a simple test using Ports ?
For that, we need Websphere MQ's specifications. Someone has them ?
But, maybe, it's better to wait for Rebol 3.0, as Ports handling is totally redesigned.
By the way, does someone know if it will be very different to define a new protocol in Rebol 3.0 compared to Rebol 2.0 ?

Thanks fo any comment, information on that topic.

[rebolnotes]

I think you ask this guy to develop it for you he's the specialist of protocols in rebol
http://cheyenne-server.org/
Cheyenne is a full-featured Apache-class web server implementation using 100% native REBOL.

[deglingo]

Yes, DocKimbel alias Nenad Rakocevic, the guy from Softinnov that did also the great MySQL driver by creating also a new protocol.
Must be very very busy, already not time to finish all the projects like this LDAP driver for Rebol/Core (http://softinnov.org/rebol/ldap.shtml ), but that's worth asking him.
That's the main problem with Rebol....a really powerful language, I'm totally convinced of that, but it miss some killer apps, IDEs,...
I'm not criticizing at all...there are lots of great things already done, and REBOL 3.0 is full of promises even if the complete version is not for tomorrow...
Design & development takes a lot of time...

Anyway thanks for your reply.

[Sunanda]

REBOL has been described as a  "messaging language."

But that does not mean it fits the middleware frameworks used  by things like CICS message queues, MQSeries, Websphere, or whatever IBM is calling the framework these days.

It's probably relatively simple to write REBOL code to interface with a Websphere API, though I've never actually tried. (I have interfaced Visual Basic to CICS message queues, so I do have *some* idea).

[deglingo]

Thanks for your reply.

I've seen this ability to define easily new protocols in Rebol.

And, as I use a lot Websphere MQ in my company in France, I've wondered if it was easy to implement a new protocol in Rebol to access MQ queues & queue managers.

But, to be honest, I don't have a sufficient level in Rebol to do that. I would like to, I try to progress. I've learnt the language with the excellent book of Olivier Auverlot.

But, if you have implemented access to CICS message queues in Visual Basic, that means that you have the low-level specs.
And do you know where I can get low-level specs for Websphere MQ, to know how I could connect, put messages to a queue, get messages using Rebol ports ?...what are the low level operations that must be performed to achieve that ? 

Do you think it could be done by using UniServe framework developped by Softinnov ? (http://softinnov.org/rebol/uniserve.shtml )

[Sunanda]

Sorry -- I don't have access to the low-level APIs.

The work I did was over 10 years ago. I had to go dig up some docs to remind me of how it all worked.

It isn't pretty.

We had CICS transactions on the mainframe that wrote to the MQs. And other CICS transactions that were initiated by the MQ triggers.

The PCs had various VB scripts that could issue specific CICS transactions.  That's how the PCs got to request that things be written to the CICS MQs. And thus trigger background MF tasks.

The PCs never had to read the MQs. But we did want to provide near real-time status info to the PCs telling them how their MQ-triggered tasks were progressing.

So we used (it was there for other purposes too) a DB/2 database that the PC had read access to. The CICS transactions wrote stuff to the DB/2 tables, and the PCs did uncommitted reads to get the latest status.

Then add in a layer of recovery code (so the PC could distinguish a CICS task that was writing DB2 status info at a glacial pace from one that had actually crashed) and we had a working framework for async processes on both platforms.

We called it SOAP -- System for Online Async Processing. Absolutely nothing do do with the XML messaging framework SOAP. We were years earlier.

So sorry, again, That does not really help much, does it?

[DideC]

Here seems to be the information you want, but maybe not in the way you want :

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wmqv6/v6r0/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.mq.amqzao.doc/rc1ae.htm

I did not read all (who can ?), and don't know if there is the network protocol description. I think it is not there !

But there is all the docs to program in different languages or technologies.
IE: there is the COM interface description and COM is pretty easy to use now in Rebol since there is a COM interface already available ( http://anton.wildit.net.au/rebol/os/windows/COMLib/ ) and the last Rebol/view allow DLL interfacing without license key.

Hope it helps.

[deglingo]

Thanks, Sunanda for this long & detailed explanation. That's not totally what I want to do.

Thanks also DideC for the explanation & for the links. Yes, it helps.
Actually, there are at least 2 ways to achieve interactions between Rebol Websphere MQ :
1) a new native 100% Rebol protocol derived from "root-protocol" object (like DocKimbel's MySQL driver) : I must have low level specs for that. It is the best one because you don't need any MQ DLL, but it must be complicated to implement, and as I said, I don't have a sufficient level in Rebol.

2) a Rebol library that accesses Websphere MQ DLLs (the solution that you describe). It should be easier, because all the complicated stuff is done in the DLLs.
I haven't heard of this COMLib library before. I've downloaded it, and made a few tries. It seems powerful.

Thanks again.

[-pekr-]

Hello,

I am long time REBOL fan (from the very beginning, you know us crazy amigans :-), and during last 12 years I worked for company which used Lotus Notes. We almost bought WebSphere MQ and later WebSphere Portal, I was even supposed to leave for IBM, but I accepted another job offer.

Right now, I work as a chief of IT department for one food supplement + pharmacy company, and sadly - MS world here :-) We are right in the front of decision of going with MS SharePoint Portal Server and IBM WebSphere portal, and so far it seems we go with MS :-)

Dunno anything about MQ protocol format, but most of the time "modern" stuff is heavy XML stuff. REBOL's XML support is pretty weak. Some guys did some nice job in that regards, but that stuff is often not fully compliant. IIRC someone wrapped even SOAP (some basic stuff).

The best guy for the protocol work is Doc Kimbel, Gabriele, and Maarten (author of Rugby).

Best regards,
-pekr-

[btiffin]

I just started looking into POSIX ipc queues today (unrelated), but I wonder if you'd get a leg up on this road if there was a REBOL implementation of mq_* POSIX calls and then hunting for linkage from there to the other ipc technologies?

Cheers
Brian