README

- INTRODUCTION
- PREREQUISITES
- PLATFORMS
- INSTALLATION
- RELEASE NOTES
- WARNINGS REGARDING WMQ V6 PCF SUPPORT
- DOCUMENTATION
- AUTHORS

# INTRODUCTION

This module implements a perl5 API for the IBM MQSeries / WebSphere MQ messaging middleware product API (often referred to as the MQI), as well as:

Object Oriented (OO) interface to the MQI
OO interface to the MQSeries administrative commands via PCF or MQSC
OO interface to the various configuration, log, and error files

For more information on the MQSeries / WebSphere MQ product itself, see the IBM website at: http://www.ibm.com/software/integration/wmq/

# PREREQUISITES

This release requires perl5.6 or later, and a current release of the IBM Websphere MQ (MQSeries) product installed, either V5.2 (+ high CSD), V5.3, V6.0, or V7.0.

# PLATFORMS

This package has been known to build with the following combinations of software. Those marked with an asterix (*) are platforms the maintainers can not test personally, so there is a remote possibility that there may be new bugs in these platforms. Please report problems to the maintainers.

      Operating System      MQSeries Version        Perl Version
      ================      ================        ============
      SunOS 5.7             5.2                     5.6
                                                    5.8
      SunOS 5.7             5.3                     Same as SunOS 5.7 / MQ 5.2
      SunOS 5.8             5.2                     Same as SunOS 5.7 / MQ 5.2
      SunOS 5.8             5.3                     Same as SunOS 5.7 / MQ 5.2
     *SunOS 5.8             6.0                     5.8
      SunOS 5.9             5.3                     Same as SunOS 5.7 / MQ 5.2
     *SunOS 5.8             7.0                     5.10
     *AIX 5.1L              6.0                     5.8
     *AIX 5.3               6.0.2                   5.8
      Red Hat AS 3.0 / ia32 5.3                     5.6
                                                    5.8
      Red Hat EL 4 / ia32   5.3                     5.8
      Red Hat EL 4 / ia32   6.0                     5.8
      Red Hat EL 4 / ia32   7.0                     5.8
      Red Hat EL 4 / x86_64 6.0                     5.8
      Red Hat EL 4 / x86_64 7.0                     5.8
     *Red Hat EL 5          6.0.2                   5.8
     *Fedora Core 6         6.0.2                   5.8
     *Windows XP SP2        5.3                     Active Perl 5.8.8
     *Windows XP SP2        6.0                     Active Perl 5.8.8
     *Windows Server 2003   5.3                     Active Perl 5.8.8
     *Windows Server 2003   6.0                     Active Perl 5.8.8

If you succeed in making this work on any other platform, please send the changes (in the form of a context diff) to the authors, so we can integrate them.

# INSTALLATION

This module installs much like anything else available on CPAN.

      perl Makefile.PL
      make
      make test
      make install

On Windows with Visual C++ 8.0, you may need to configure a manifest file. See README.windows for more details.

Before building the module, you need to edit the CONFIG file and change, minimally, the name of the queue manager against which the tests will run. The rest of the defaults should be reasonable, but you will have to customize this file to match your local environment. The CONFIG file has comments which document each of the parameters, so go read it for more information.

On some platforms (notably Linux and HP-UX), you need to link to different libraries depending on whether your perl has been set up to run multi-theaded or not. The MQClient/Makefile.PL script tries to figure this out automatically; if you run into issues, patches to that script will be welcome.

You will obviously need to create the queue used for the test suite on the queue manager you specified in the CONFIG file.

NOTE: If you do not support client channel table files, then you may have to set the MQSERVER environment variable in order to allow the client tests to work.

Any failure in the test suite should a cause for concern. In order to get more details from it, run it via:

      make test TEST_VERBOSE=1

If you can't figure out what broke, then send the author the output from ``perl -V'', as well as the output from the verbose test run. Please include as many details as possible about the operating system and MQSeries software on both the host being used to compile this extension, as well as the queue manager to which the test suite is connecting.

The most common problem with this module is failure to connect to the queue manager. Before submitting a bug report for the MQClient::MQSeries modules, make sure the IBM-supplied sample utilities `amqsgetc` and `amqsputc` work.

# RELEASE NOTES

The Changes.html file has a complete, historical list of all user-visible (and some invisible) changes to this code.

# WARNINGS REGARDING WMQ V6 PCF SUPPORT

You should be warned this release does not contain support for every new PCF command made available in V6. The following are not supported in this release:

Inquire Archive Inquire ChannelInitiator Inquire EntityAuthority Inquire Group Inquire Log Inquire System Move Queue Refresh QueueManager Reset QueueManager Resume QueueManager Set Archive Set Log Set System Stop ChannelInitiator Suspend QueueManager

You should be warned not all new PCF commands which are supported in this release have been throughly tested by the maintainers. New PCF commands which have been throughly tested include:

Change/Copy/Create/Inquire/Delete/Stop ChannelListener Change/Copy/Create/Inquire/Delete/Start/Stop Service Inquire ChannelListenerStatus Inquire QueueManagerStatus Inquire ServiceStatus

Though we believe the rest to work just fine.

You should be warned 'filtering' is not supported in this release. You will not be able to specify parameters such as 'IntegerFilterCommand', 'StringFilterCommand' or 'ByteStringFilterCommand' for those objects where filtering has been made available.

# DOCUMENTATION

The documentation will be installed as man pages by default, but the location of them depends entirely on how you have perl built and installed. Watch the installation, and you will see where they get installed. Prepend that to your MANPATH environment variable, and then, all of these man commands will work.

Personally, the author prefers the results of ``pod2html'', but the perl5 Makefile.PL infrastructure won't do this for you automatically.

      man MQSeries

will provide the documentation for the core MQI interface, and,

      man MQSeries::QueueManager
      man MQSeries::Queue
      man MQSeries::Message

will provide the core documentation for the OO interface.

The following man pages document the classes that handle various special MQSeries message types:

      man MQSeries::Message::Event
      man MQSeries::Message::Storable
      man MQSeries::Message::PCF
      man MQSeries::Message::DeadLetter

There is an OO interface to the Command Server:

      man MQSeries::Command
      man MQSeries::Command::Request
      man MQSeries::Command::Response

A number of utility classes have been created for parsing the various file formats used by the MQSeries product:

      man MQSeries::Config::ChannelTable
      man MQSeries::Config::Machine
      man MQSeries::Config::QMgr
      man MQSeries::ErrorLog::Parser
      man MQSeries::ErrorLog::Tail
      man MQSeries::ErrorLog::Entry
      man MQSeries::FDC::Parser
      man MQSeries::FDC::Tail
      man MQSeries::FDC::Entry

# AUTHORS

The code is currently maintained and supported by:

      Hildo Biersma <Hildo.Biersma@MorganStanley.com>

Most of the previous development, maintenance and support work was done by:

      W. Phillip Moore (no longer at Morgan Stanley)

We also have to give credit to:

      Brian T. Shelden <shelden@shelden-associates.com>

for his help in porting and testing the code.

This module was originally developed as an IBM SupportPac, so credit must also go to the original author:

      David J. Lennon <davidl@bristol.com>

Although, nothing remains of the original code.... (sorry, David :-)