WebSphere MQ, formerly known as MQSeries, is industry-leading middleware created by IBM Corporation. Due to its assured delivery of messages, data integrity and resource protection, time independence and message-driven processing, WebSphere MQ has become very popular as message-oriented middleware in the integration of applications enterprise wide. But working on WebSphere MQ as an administrator or developer is not so easy.

The majority of WebSphere MQ installations are in distributed environments that have more than one queue manager on heterogenous platforms. To work with all of these queue managers, you can use a Command line utility called "runmqsc" provided by IBM, on all platforms. IBM has also provided a graphical tool, WebSphere MQ Explorer (formerly MQSeries Explorer), which is the most reliable but has limited functionality. For example, you can only view the first 200 messages on a local queue. Moreover, you can view the data in Text and Hexadecimal forms only with other headers, if present. The RFH headers and data in EBCDIC are displayed as junk characters along with the real data. So, a tool is needed that provides you with various administration capabilities and development facilities with one click of a mouse.

WMQTool is a graphical tool I developed that addresses most of the needs of administrators and developers. It is developed in J2SDK 1.4.1. Using WMQTool, you can administer as many queue managers as you want, organized into different categories in a tree structure, on just a single window screen (see Figure 1).

You can have views of queues, channels, processes, client connections, and namelists in a sorted tabular form. You can select your own set of columns of these views and put them in any order. You can create any objects, update their properties, or delete them. Different signs are provided to visually indicate the status of the objects. You can view an indefinite number of messages, depending upon the availability of such hardware resources as memory and space on the hard drive. Data and headers can be viewed separately in a readable form, allowing you to cut and paste the readable data.

Cluster queues and channels can be viewed along with your other queues and channels. You can easily eliminate viewing unnecessary objects by setting a "Filter" on them, thereby leaving only important objects for you in views. You can identify the platform and WebSphere MQ version of the queue manager on which you are currently working at the right bottom of the main window.

For WebSphere MQ Integrator developers, you can put a testing message on any queue with or without RFH headers. You can view any kind of data, ASCII or EBCDIC, in XML format or in an XML tree structure or plain text format. It's easy to locate a particular range of bytes within a large message. You can edit the data of the message so as to change any particular byte/s. If you so choose, you can remove a Transmission header or Dead Letter header, if present, from the messages and put them back on a different queue. You can take messages that have been backed up in a file on your hard drive and restore them to any queue whenever you require.

And what about security? Yes, WMQTool also has provisions for security. You can implement Security Exit of WMQTool and be assured that only authorized people can work on WMQTool and your queue managers. WMQTool provides security in very detailed levels, meaning that you can selectively allow users of WMQTool to work on only certain types of objects. For example, if you want to restrict application programmers from altering any queues but want to allow them to turn triggers on or off, or simply let them view the objects, you can do it easily with WMQTool.