This month we ask IBM ® WebSphere® Business Integration expert Alan Powell to answer your questions about installing and using WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker (formally WebSphere MQSeries Integrator Broker) and WebSphere Business Integration Event Broker (formally WebSphere MQSeries Event Broker). WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker is the leading message broker, offering in-flight routing, transformation, logging, and enrichment of messages. It includes WebSphere Business Integration Event Broker that extends WebSphere MQ messaging transport with other protocols, including those for mobile and telemetry endpoints and provides publish and subscribe capabilities. Alan Powell is a technical strategist responsible for defining functions that are added to new versions of WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker and Event Broker. For more information, see WebSphere Business Integration Zone.
Question: We have recently purchased both MQ Integrator Broker and WebSphere Portal, and the WebSphere development environment. We have a lot of experience with Oracle® and it appears from the documentation Oracle will work with both Integrator Broker and Portal. Is this correct? Is there any downside to using Oracle (aside from licensing cost) instead of the supplied DB2®? (submitted by John Mills)
Answer: WebSphere MQ Integrator Broker uses databases for a number of purposes:
- Holding broker runtime configuration information.
- Holding user business data.
- Holding a central configuration definition for a domain of brokers.
You can hold the broker runtime information and user business data in DB2, Oracle, Sybase® Microsoft® SQL Server databases. The central configuration data must be held in a DB2 database. A copy of DB2 is supplied with MQ Integrator Broker on most platforms. There is no downside with using Oracle rather than DB2. WebSphere Portal also allows access to information stored in Oracle databases.
Question: We are wanting to integrate feeds (email, file, manual key entry, fax) into our transaction processing systems. Feeds are both incoming and outgoing (over email, fax, report, file, socket and web services channels). Feeds are primarily from mainframes, in proprietary, containing transactional and switch details for payment card transactions.
Our system does the following:
- Resolves the transactions automatically or manually.
- Translates/transforms the transactions.
- Provides reporting.
Goals:
- Externalize the resolution logic from code into modeling tool. Thinking of using a rules engine features here.
- Workflow queue management to assign, resolve, route, and transform various transactions and provide reporting/notifications on end results and statuses. Thinking of using a workflow queue management system.
Question: What are the right WebSphere/IBM products to use here for Workflow Queue Manager, Workflow process model builder and rules engine? Am lost, with plethora of options under the WebSphere family. Would appreciate if you can help guide me to the appropriate tools. BTW, competitive offering from Oracle 9i AS has all components with Toplink bundles in. (submitted by Deepak Bajaj)
Answer: Let me try to summarize the main WebSphere environments for you:
- WebSphere Application Server lets you deploy a core application environment for a reliable foundation capable of high volume, secure transactions, and Web services.
- WebSphere Portal helps people interact in a personalized way with diverse business resources.
- WebSphere Business Integration Server provides an integration solution for process integration, workforce management, and enterprise application connectivity and contains:
From your description of the functions you require, I think Business Integration Server would best suit your needs. Business Integration Message Broker within Business Integration Server provides the ability to transform and route messages as well as providing a rules capability. MQ Worflow provides the ability to model business processes and allocation of work items to users when manual intervention is required.
Question: Is there a plan to release WBIMB Help in PDF format? It'll be great to have documentation in PDF format so that it can be read offline. (submitted by Kiran Ingale)
Answer: We do plan to provide the WBIMB documentation in PDF format in the near future. There is a standalone help system available that you can download from the WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker library.
Question: What are the major new functions in WBI Message Broker 5.0?
Answer: The tooling for the WebSphere Business Integration Brokers is now built on the Eclipse framework. This ensures a common technology and skill set with other WebSphere products. As such, the design and deployment model is different from previous releases. Use of the Eclipse platform has allowed for usability enhancements, such as a new Mapping Node, improved and extended samples and much easier versioning. WebSphere Business Integration Event Broker (previously WMQEB) is now a true subset of WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker (previously WMQIB). This means that the high performance WebSphere MQ Realtime Transport is now supported by all the Brokers. In addition to this protocol, SOAP over HTTP and multicast publish/subscribe are now supported. Message modeling capabilities have been updated in line with XML schema standards, including increased validation and support for namespaces. The product architecture has been modified to ease integration with the Eclipse platform. Due to this, the configuration manager now purely manages deployment from development to the runtime components. The configuration manager is no longer a repository. Support for the Linux operating system has also been added in this release.
Question: How do you transform messages using the Broker?
Answer: The Broker provides two technologies for transforming messages. The compute node uses EQSL as the language for defining the transformations. Or, you can use the graphical mapping capabilities of the mapping node. The XML transformation node uses standard XSL stylesheets to transform messages. The Broker is a flexible framework that allows you to easily add other transformation technologies.
Question: Can I use non-MQ protocols to send messages into and out of the Brokers?
Answer: You can use WebSphere MQ messages to drive work in and out of the Brokers. Additionally, you can send data both in and out of the Brokers using WebSphere MQ Everyplace, WebSphere MQ Telemetry Transport (previously known as MQIsdp or SCADA), WebSphere MQ Realtime Transport (also known as JMS/IP), WebSphere MQ Web Services Transport (SOAP over HTTP) and WebSphere MQ Multicast Transport (for output only). Finally, as the Brokers are designed as an extensible framework, you can add function to them by writing additional functions that you can plug in as a node. One example of an additional node is a program that takes data flowing through the Broker and sends it out using other protocols.
Question: Is there an security exposure when using the multicast transport?
Answer: When multicast is used directly between publishers and subscribers, it is difficult to prevent other applications from receiving the data. However, because in this case multicast is controlled by the Broker, it is possible to allow only authorized subscribers and to encrypt messages sent to them.
Question: Does the Configuration Manager have to run on Windows®?
Answer: Yes, the configuration manager only runs on Windows and only uses DB2 to store the configuration information.
Question: Can you run more than one Broker per system?
Answer: Yes, you can run multiple Brokers on a system, but each Broker requires its own queue manager. They can, however, share the same configuration database tables. You can only run one configuration manager per system.
Question: What factors in message flow design have a big impact in performance?
Answer: The key things to know are that as all communication between nodes in the message flow is done in memory, there should be good performance through a message flow, depending on the size of the machine you use and the amount of memory available. Other determining factors are whether any of the nodes are interacting with external systems, such as databases. If external systems are involved, unless WebSphere MQ connections are used asynchronously, then the performance through the message flow are affected by the performance of the external system. Another factor in the performance of the message flow is the size of the messages being passed through the flow, and also the amount of processing being done on the messages in the flow. All these things should be taken into consideration when designing the message flow for performance.
Question: Can you access data in remote databases from a message flow?
Answer: You can access remote databases as long as the ODBC driver and database client on the system, where the Broker is running, are configured to access the remote database. There are some restrictions when accessing remote databases on platforms. For example, you can access OS/400 and Microsoft SQL Server from the Windows platforms only.
Question: For educational purposes (I am developing course MQ66 WBIMB Workshop for IBM IT Education Services), I want to develop 2 message flows that communicate via HTTP nodes. That is, flow TEST "HTTPRequests" service from flow TESTWS, which starts with HTTPInput and ends with HTTPReply. I am having problems in getting that to work. (submitted by MK)
- Do you have a working example for this?
- Also, I am not sure I fully understand the concept. My messages are MRM and I created WSDL, but is WSDL really needed in my scenario? There is no property in HTTP nodes to specify WSDL files? Or is WSDL only needed for Web Services that run on real Web/Application Servers?
- I kept the default properties in HTTPRequest node/Advanced (Generate default HTTP headers from input) and thus
expected all SOAP and HTTP headers would be created for me, but instead got:
BIP3162S: An error occured whilst performing a Web Service request. The HTTP Request Header bitstream (if any) sent to the server was: ''. The HTTP Request Messsage Body bitstream (if any) sent to the server was: ''. The HTTP Reply Header bitstream (if any) received from the server was: ''. The HTTP Reply Message Body bitstream (if any) received from the server was: ''. Ensure that the HTTP data is valid.Do I really have to construct SOAP envelope by hand-crafted ESQL?
Meet the Experts is a monthly feature on WSDD. We give you access to the best minds in IBM WebSphere, product experts and executives who are waiting to answer your questions. You submit the questions, and we post the answers to the most popular questions.
Comments (Undergoing maintenance)
Table of contents
Local resources
My developerWorks community
Tags
Use the slider bar to see more or fewer tags.
Popular tags shows the top tags for this particular content zone (for example, Java technology, Linux, WebSphere).
My tags shows your tags for this particular content zone (for example, Java technology, Linux, WebSphere).
Popular article tags |
My article tagsSkip to tags list
Popular article tags |
My article tags
