What’s up with MQ?

I haven’t blogged about my core work for a while, so it’s probably about time. This is a bit of a round-up of some of the things I’ve observed happening around in the MQ space lately.

WebSphere MQ stuff

It’s a year of anniversaries. Apart from IBM Hursley hitting 50 (reminding me that I’ve yet to post my Spitfire photos from the celebratory open day weekend), IBM Warwick is 30 and WebSphere is celebrating 10 years. WebSphere MQ was formerly called MQSeries, of course, and has been around a few years longer than the “parent” brand, with a 15th birthday this year.

I’m sure the numbering is merely a coincidence, but there’s a good article on IBM developerWorks entitled The top 15 WebSphere MQ best practices.

WMQ reached version 7 this year. I had some very positive experiences with the alpha version of the product last year, although I’ve not yet had a play with the GA release. The new HTTP support is particularly interesting from a Web 2.0 perspective, and I keep meaning to build some demos around that that feature.

In related news, WebSphere MQ now has a Twitter account, so if you want to catch the latest news and announcements you might want to follow that.

I picked that last nugget up from my friend and US colleague T.Rob Wyatt, who has been blogging for a while now… T.Rob is an expert who is absolutely worth following if you work in the MQ space. He’s also pointed out that there’s a new blog for IBM’s new Managed File Transfer product which was announced last month.

Other messaging-related notes

For some non-IBM messaging middleware updates, just to note that 0MQ (ZeroMQ) sounds intriguing (via Matt Perrins, who notes that it is nothing to do with Project Zero). I’ve done a lot of work with clients in the financial sector in particular, so I’ll be interested to see how this develops. One of the nice things about my other “pet” product, WebSphere Message Broker, is that it sits in the sweet spot of connectivity between different transports and protocols, so I guess I’ll be looking at how to make things talk to one another if 0MQ takes off.