Tag: ibmmqlight

IBM AMQP

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Introduction

This blog post will concludes information about the IBM MQ product with the AMQP protocol capabilities as well as an intuitive sample Producer and Consumer applications that I have coded. Furthermore, I have deliberately gathered some definitions from the IBM’s main page and enriched the content with my reflections.

Prerequisites

In order to have a smooth and easy setup, I’ll use an official IBM MQ Light docker image which brings good benefits of:

  • A nice and intuitive UI that shows summary of Clients and Messages,
  • getting rid of the complex installation and configuration of the IBM MQ with AMQP support. have been there done that before.

On top of that the project is prepared using Maven, assuming that you have this tool already.

IBM MQ Light Docker Image

I’ll be using docker image straight ahead from the repository. A well-documented explanation can be found @ GitHub page

In my local setup docker is installed in a virtual machine thus, in the following chapters, you will see my connection string as “virtualcentos“. Anyway let’s gather the image and run the container:

sudo docker run \
  --env LICENSE=accept \
  --volume /var/example:/var/mqlight \
  --publish 5672:5672 \
  --publish 9180:9180 \
  --detach \
  ibmcom/mqlight:1.0

Docker will pull the latest image and open the ports of 5672 for Application Connection and 9180 for the Web Application. Once the container is up and running, hit the address http://localhost:9180 and see the container works as expected.

  • MQ Light Web Console

Source Code

I have written a sample application that cover the Event Producing and Consuming scenarios. The full code is available @ my GitHub Repository

After checking out the code, you can use these queries to test the system

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/api/certificate -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d "{\"name\":\"myCertificate\",\"fingerprint\":\"34:AB:45:3e:6y:XX\"}" 

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/api/credential -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d "{\"username\":\"root\",\"password\":\"p@$$w0rd\"}"

Concepts

There are four concepts in the ecosystem which I’ll briefly summarize. It is important to apprehend these basics.

Message

Message is the simplest form of the data that is being transmitted across the network. A message can simply consist of String, Bytes or JSON. For JSON formats, the API client internally utilizes GSON.

Topic

Topic is the main entry point for publishing applications, messages initially arrive in a topic. Besides that, topic is also responsible of routing the messages to the right destinations. Topic can contain multiple “/” that will make sub topics. For proper wild cards, consult the documentation

Destination

Destinations hold the messages and are associated with topics. A destination can have one or multiple topics associated with it. If a message is sent to a topic without a destination, it will not be delivered to any application. In addition, Destinations are always created with a time-to-live value, which can be automatically set or programmatically set. Once the TTL is exceeded, the destination will be removed automatically.

Sharing

Sharing allows applications to exclusively set to share the same destination. Applications sharing the same destination will receive the messages in the Round Robin fashion which is that messages are shared among the applications

Message quality of service (QOS)

IBM MQ product takes the matter of assurance of the connections and messages in varieties:

  • Message quality of service (QOS)
  • Subscription time-to-live
  • Subscriber auto-confirm
  • Message persistence

The QOS topic is very vital for designing messaging durability and performance. You can mix up different scenarios with different settings. For more detailed answers consult the IBM documentation.

IBM MQ Light Non-blocking API

The Non-blocking API is provided by the IBM to be able to connect to the product. Here is the link to browse the content of the Java API. In the sample project, you can find the maven repository for the Java client, for other clients, you can browse to the IBM Page. In this section I am more interested in drawing your attention

Useful Resources