What is MQe for?
- Secure messaging on lightweight
devices such as sensors, phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and laptop
and desktop computers
What is messaging?
- Software (as contained in MQ and MQe) that performs for you the work of
sending and receiving data between your applications, and over networks. Message
delivery is assured, decoupled from the application, and your
application programmers do not need to have detailed communications programming
knowledge.
- When an application wants to transfer data to another application, it
puts the data into messages, and then puts the messages onto a queue.
- The queue is owned and run by a queue manager.
- A further application (or another part of the same one) can be configured
to do one of the following:
- The further application can retrieve those messages from the same queue.
- The queue manager can be configured to send the messages on the queue
through a connection over the network to a queue on a remote queue
manager on another computer, where another application retrieves them.
- The destination application can pull the messages across the network when
it needs them.
- You can have many queues on one queue manager.
- On MQe, you can only have one queue manager per JVM or process.
What is MQe?
- A toolkit, supported on a range of platforms:
- The API is available in Java or C.
- The product function is delivered as Java™ classes and
C .DLLs.
How does it work?
- A queue manager is created as a set of information that describes the
queue manager's original basic configuration.
- This information is held in the MQe registry (Note: on Windows® systems
this is not the Windows registry).
- On your device, an application can now start that queue manager, and it
runs as long as the application runs. When the application stops, the queue
manager stops.
- When a queue manager is running it can be extensively configured and reconfigured
by sending it MQe administration messages, (which also update the information
in the registry). Typically you generate these messages with the administrative
tools MQe_Script and MQe_Explorer.
- On your server, you can write an application that runs the
queue manager. This application can then run constantly, allowing client queue
managers to send messages as required. On a Windows system, it is possible to run
a queue manager application as a service so that it runs every time
the computer is started.
How do you use it?
- You must write your own application to use MQe.
- You create your MQe device queue manager configuration, and develop
your MQe application, on a PC.
- You download only the files and components that you need (for both your
application, and MQe) to your device, and then run it there.
- You run an MQe server queue manager, on a computer other than a
device, for the devices to connect to and send their messages to.
- If you want to communicate with MQ, you run an MQe gateway queue manager (on
a computer other than a device) which acts as an intermediary - it can receive
MQe messages from your devices (or your server), transform them into
MQ-compatible messages, and then exchange them with MQ.
- You can create queue managers and remotely manage your
MQe network using two downloadable SupportPacs: MQe_Script (scriptable commands),
or MQe_Explorer (GUI).
- You can experiment with MQe, without writing an application,
using these same tools.
Are there any special features?
- You can exploit adapters to map MQe to device interfaces. For example:
- Channels (used on each end of a connection) exploit protocol
adapters to run over HTTP, native TCP/IP, UDP, and other protocols.
- Queues exploit field storage adapters to interface to a storage
subsystem such as memory or the file system.
- You can achieve security at three levels:
- Local security
- Protects message-related data at a local level.
- Message-level security
- Protects messages between the initiating and receiving MQe application.
- Queue-based security
- Protects messages between the initiating queue manager and the target
queue.
- You can use rules to customize the behavior of some of the main
MQe components.
- You can use tracing and event logging to help debug
your application.