Installable services and components for AIX®, Linux®, and Windows

This section introduces the installable services and the functions and components associated with them. The interface to these functions is documented so that you, or software vendors, can supply components.

The main reasons for providing IBM® MQ installable services are:

To provide you with the flexibility of choosing whether to use components provided by IBM MQ products, or replace or augment them with others.
To allow vendors to participate, by providing components that might use new technologies, without making internal changes to IBM MQ products.
To allow IBM MQ to exploit new technologies faster and cheaper, and so provide products earlier and at lower prices.

Installable services and service components are part of the IBM MQ product structure. At the center of this structure is the part of the queue manager that implements the function and rules associated with the Message Queue Interface (MQI). This central part requires a number of service functions, called installable services, in order to perform its work. The installable services are:

Authorization service
Name service

Each installable service is a related set of functions implemented using one or more service components. Each component is invoked using a properly-architected, publicly-available interface. This enables independent software vendors and other third parties to provide installable components to augment or replace those provided by the IBM MQ products. Table 1 summarizes the services and components that can be used.

Table 1. Installable service components summary
Installable service	Supplied component	Function	Requirements
Authorization service	object authority manager (OAM)	Provides authorization checking on commands and MQI calls. Users can write their own component to augment or replace the OAM. For example, to check that a user ID has authority to open a queue.	(Appropriate platform authorization facilities are assumed)
Name service	None	Provides support to the queue manager for looking up the name of the queue manager that owns a specified queue. User defined	A third-party or user-written name manager

The installable services interface is described in Installable services interface reference information.