System Administration Guide

Why installable services?

The main reasons for providing WebSphere MQ installable services are:

To provide you with the flexibility of choosing whether to use components provided by WebSphere MQ products, or replace or augment them with others.
To allow vendors to participate, by providing components that might use new technologies, without making internal changes to WebSphere MQ products.
To allow WebSphere MQ to exploit new technologies faster and cheaper, and so provide products earlier and at lower prices.

Installable services and service components are part of the WebSphere MQ product structure. At the center of this structure is the part of the queue manager that implements the function and rules associated with the Message Queue Interface (MQI). This central part requires a number of service functions, called installable services, in order to perform its work. The installable services are:

Authorization service
Name service

Each installable service is a related set of functions implemented using one or more service components. Each component is invoked using a properly-architected, publicly-available interface. This enables independent software vendors and other third parties to provide installable components to augment or replace those provided by the WebSphere MQ products. Table 21 summarizes the services and components that can be used on the WebSphere MQ V5.3 platforms.

Table 21. Installable service components summary

Installable service Supplied component Function Requirements

Authorization service Object Authority Manager (OAM) Provides authorization checking on commands and MQI calls. Users can write their own component to augment or replace the OAM. (Appropriate platform authorization facilities are assumed)

Name service

DCE name service component

Allows queue managers to share queues, or
User defined

Note: Shared queues must have their Scope attribute set to CELL.

DCE is required for the supplied component, or
A third-party or user-written name manager