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WebSphere MQ

Technical detail

WebSphere MQ clients enable rapid and simple connectivity into your reliable messaging backbone across virtually any commercial IT system.

The breadth of operating environments, languages and programming models supported by WebSphere MQ clients offers choice and flexibility – supporting the skills and assets you have now and the decisions you make tomorrow.

	Download free WebSphere MQ clients on a range of platforms
	Download a book on WebSphere MQ clients
	Read more details on Extended Transactional Clients

This table summarises the differences between messaging services offered by WebSphere MQ servers and clients.

*Clients*
Feature	Servers	Extended Transactional	Standard
Provides Queue Manager?	Yes	No	No
Enables Asynchronous Messaging?	Yes	No¹	No¹
Queue operations within single Unit of Work (UOW)?	Yes	Yes²	No
Manages Units of Work?	Yes	No³	No
Workload management (Clustering support)?	Yes	No	No
Runs on z/OS?	Yes⁴	No	No
Licensing	Server license required	Server license required	Free. Terms and conditions apply
Availability	Buy online	Installation option when installing Server	Download now

Notes:

Synchronous messaging only.
Only for Queues owned by the Server it is immediately connected to.
Requires an external transaction manager.
WebSphere MQ for z/OS servers require an additional Client Attachment license for MQ clients to connect into it. This also applies when connecting the new WebSphere MQ V6.0 MQ Explorer tooling into WebSphere MQ for zOS V6.0 deployments since it uses client channels – although there is no longer a need to install a client on machines running this release of MQ Explorer.

Languages and APIs

WebSphere MQ supports the following languages and APIs for connecting applications to its clients and servers.

Java
RPG
COBOL
C and C++
C++ .NET and C# .NET
Visual Basic and Visual Basic .NET

For details of using WebSphere MQ in .NET environments see this Redbook.

APIs	Description
JMS (Java Message Service)	Industry standard. Java only. WebSphere MQ supports V1.1 (and V1.0). Interoperates with JMS support in WebSphere Application Server.
MQ Interface (MQI)	De facto standard. Backwards compatible between MQ releases.

See WebSphere MQ systems requirements for more details.

IBM Message Service clients

Java Message Service (JMS), as the name suggests, is a standard interface for messaging that is limited to the Java programming language only.

IBM has developed APIs that are consistent with JMS but implemented in additional languages.

Flexibility and Choice

Clients are available that target WebSphere MQ, WebSphere Application Server messaging, WebSphere ESB and WebSphere Message Broker.

	IBM Message Service client for C / C++
	IBM Message Service client for .NET