MQe provides sophisticated security that allows applications to run over HTTP, through the protection of an Internet firewall. The purpose of the WebSphere® Everyplace® communications adapter is to allow MQe applications to authenticate themselves with the WebSphere Everyplace authentication proxy and thus allow messages to flow through it. The following diagram shows a basic scenario with two applications communicating over the Internet through the WebSphere Everyplace authentication proxy.
The MQe adapter acts as the Auth HTTP adapter on the sending application. The receiving application could use either the same adapter or the standard HTTP adapter provided with MQe.
However, the real value of MQe is that it allows asynchronous messaging to occur in a typically synchronous environment. It is possible to gather enqueued requests from the receiving application and deal with them time-independently. The following diagram shows how incoming requests could be made to reach MQ servers asynchronously.
In each of these environments the WebSphere authentication proxy is adding the ability to control access to the receiving applications. The adapter code supports this by adding (application-supplied) user ID and password information to each outgoing HTTP request. The WebSphere authentication proxy accepts these requests and verifies that the supplied credentials are valid for the current environment. If the credentials are valid the proxy forwards the request to the receiving application.