On my research list: WebSphere MQ and Delphi.
The funny thing is that this Delphi MQ Series question on StackOverflow that I answered actually helped me to get going :)
A few interesting links:
- IBM provided Delphi unit for WebSphere MQ Serie (PDF documentation, ZIP file with source)
- Delphi related threads on MQSeries.net
- Repository with links to documentation, fixpacks, etc on MQSeries.net
The research actually is focussed to replace a APPC/CPI-C session based solution that runs on top of SNA using LU 6.2 endpoints and has round-trip response times between 50 and 150 milliseconds with a WebSphere MQ based solution having similar performance characteristics. It binds multiple client applications to multiple function entries on the AS/400 systems at the client.
The current APPC/CPI-C part is written either both a DLL and EXE in Delphi (depending on how it is used), hence the Delphi part of the research.
In many organizations, WebSphere MQ (aka MQSeries) is part of their Enterprise Service Bus. In that regard, the SNA solution was far a ahead of its time.
BTW: Back then (almost 15 years ago), the SNA solution started out as solution using AS/400 Data Queues. Even after months of trying, that didn’t work well because the mixed environment of NetSoft Router, AS/400, SNA Server and Windows NT 4 in a pretty big WAN had huge problems.
Somehow, one of the layers forced sessions to always use 2 connections at a time, which was causing huge problems when those were routed through different SNA servers. That routing was unpredictable (and it was not possible to disable/force it to use stick to one SNA server). In addition, it was memory and CPU hungry on the PC side (when you were glad to have a Pentium MMX based CPU with 32 MB RAM, it ate 20+% of the CPU power, and 25+% of the memory per session, peaking to 100% CPU and 50% of RAM per session).
Specialists from all involved parties weren’t able to pinpoint the actual cause, so we went a few steps down on the OSI layer to the APPC leve.
–jeroen
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