Message middleware links 3000s to apps

Willow, Level 8 solutions form connections between 3000s and NT, non-3000 systems

HP 3000 sites are connecting their applications and databases to servers with object technology and Microsoft components, and the customers’ efforts have produced two new middleware solutions.

The HP 3000 division (CSY) has announced that Level 8 Systems and Willow Technology are both offering message-oriented middleware (MOM) that interfaces with HP 3000s. HP’s Alvina Nishimoto, R&D Project Manager for Internet and Interoperability at CSY, said the new MOM solutions were driven by 3000 customers’ requests.

“With the ability to link HP 3000-based systems to new Windows and Windows NT systems, companies can now leverage their investment in their HP 3000 systems by significantly extending the productive life cycle of their applications,” she said.

MOM connects applications through synchronous or asynchronous links, and lets applications make requests by passing messages directly to the middleware. These messages are records calling for actions and supplying the input needed for those actions. Using an event-driven mode of processing, MOM waits for a message to invoke the action.

One of the advantages of MOM is its simplicity and flexibility. E-mail-like messages contain a unit of information and address information. MOM’s downsides crop up when two pieces of software need to continuously communicate. That’s when a object request broker solution works better.

At Level 8 (919.380.5000), FalconMQ is being offered for HP 3000s, bringing an API and Microsoft NT listener to market that lets 3000 applications share information with NT systems. Product manager Ivan Casanova said the product got its MPE port when Sunrider International, a manufacturer and distributor of health products, wanted to bring its catalog-based operations onto the Web.

Sunrider, whose business model Casanova said includes distribution opportunities “like Avon’s,” said the company “wanted to move to the Web and let their distributors make orders and check orders. The wanted to do a lot of Web development and use Windows for it, and needed a mechanism for connecting HP 3000 to the Windows Web development environment.”

FalconMQ delivers a pathway to technology called Microsoft Message Queue services (MSMQ), and got ported to the HP 3000 as a result of Sunrider’s needs. HP helped Level 8 port the product through HP’s Solution Providers Program.

FalconMQ is billed as an enterprise platform for building cross-platform message queuing solutions based on MSMQ. It’s available on Unix, MVS, AS/400 and Digital servers as well as the HP 3000. MSMQ is included for free with Windows NT, and will be bundled with Windows 2000 as well.

Falcon’s job is to link Windows NT processes and business logic hosted on NT systems with the HP 3000, according to Casanova. The software is a Windows-based implementation of the IBM mainframe MQSeries. MQSeries provides links, and other middleware can tie into it. Level 8’s product brings MSMQ to the HP 3000.

“We’re extending a more fundamental Microsoft programming model to the HP 3000, Casanova said. “Willow’s stuff is really an IBM MQSeries solution.” Willow is connecting other systems to the HP 3000, while Level 8 is connecting NT to the HP 3000.

FalconMQ doesn’t require any ODBC technology to be in place for IMAGE/SQL databases to communicate with the NT systems, Casanova added.

At Sunrider, the company bought into the Level 8 technology to get its 3000 COBOL applications talking with a Web environment hosted on NT servers. Level 8 didn’t need detailed knowledge of the Sunrider applications, Casanova said.

“Once we were able to provide the middleware that was working, in-house development staff [at Sunrider] actually wrote the application with extracted data from the ERP databases,” he said. “All we knew was there was some ERP package; we didn’t get that involved in it, really.

“The education process was teaching them how to use our API within the COBOL application they were going to write. It was going to accept Web requests, take requests off the queue and do a lookup in a database, and then put a reply on a queue.”

Level 8 also offers software that runs on top of FalconMQ, what Casanova calls “a light-weight ubiquitous infrastructure for delivering integration solutions based on Windows technology, leveraging things like the COM model and OLE DB, Active X and other key Microsoft technologies. This is intended to give developers a platform to write WinDNA applications.”

WinDNA is an architecture promoted by Microsoft for delivering multi-tiered distributed applications, with Microsoft components on both front ends and middleware tiers, and systems like HP 3000s on the back end.

One prospective advantage of working with MOM middleware is to tie HP 3000s into the COM object capabilities on NT systems. Business logic is hosted on the Windows platform as COM components. “The heavy lifting and heavy processing could be done on the HP 3000, because it does those things very well — it’s very reliable and very high performance,” Casanova said.

FalconMQ is tier-based and sells for $5,000 to $10,000, with no run time fees for NT systems it interfaces with.

Willow for MQSeries

The other middleware option new to HP 3000 developers comes from Willow Technology (408.377.7292), which released an MQSeries client for MPE/iX this fall. Willow’s take on MOM is delivering IBM’s implementation of asynchronous message queuing to non-IBM systems, covering a wide range of systems as clients. Willow holds the license to the MQSeries software.

The software works with C and COBOL interfaces of HP 3000 applications, and currently must be accessed from the Posix namespace of MPE/iX, version 5.5 or later. Willow president Gary Clueit said his company is now offering an MQ client, but not an MQ server — although he’s gotten requests for a server now that the MPE/iX MQ client is available.

“It allows MPE applications to use MQSeries networks,” Clueit said. “They will talk to any MQSeries server out there,” running on HP-UX, NT, MVS and other platforms. Clueit said MQ is supported on 35 operating systems.

The difference between the client and server implementations of MQSeries is that a queue manager hosted on a non-3000 system must be employed. 3000 programs write to an MQI, the MQSeries programmatic interface. The application has no knowledge of whether it’s talking to a client or a server; it talks to the API. It connects to a queue manager, a server that can open queues and let applications read and write to them.

“Usually the queue manager is running on the same system your application is running on. When you do the connect to the queue manager, it’s across the network,” Clueit said. “The application doesn’t know the difference.”

Willow sees the target audience for its MOM as companies that already have an MQSeries server in the enterprise. “Lots of customers have MQ running on HP-UX, or NT, or an IBM mainframe. It’s pretty much there,” Clueit said. “We’ve got customers using it to get [3000] information into systems supporting e-commerce.”

When 3000 sites asked HP for an MQSeries implementation for the 3000, “HP couldn’t do it, and they asked IBM, and IBM said ‘Talk to Willow,’ ” Clueit said. “We’re the only people who do porting of MQSeries to platforms that IBM doesn’t support.”

The Willow product offers a path into the broader spectrum of MQSeries, Clueit said, while “the FalconMQ product only gets you into the world of MSMQ, which is an NT product. We get them onto MQ Series running on NT, as well as just about every other major operating system on the planet.”

If a company only needs to establish connections to NT’s bundled MSMQ middleware, Level 8’s product may be enough, Clueit said. He added that “one of the main value propositions of the MQSeries is that it runs on so many different platforms.”

MQSeries is installed in more than 6,000 customer sites, according to Clueit, including “over 350 of IBM’s top 500 customers, and about 68 percent of European and North American banks. It also has about two-thirds of the worldwide market share in messaging engines.”

Willow sells the server side of MQSeries for Silicon Graphics systems and SCO’s Unixware, and the company is considering creating an MQSeries server for the 3000 as well. “Then we’ll start going into sites that don’t necessarily already have MQ installed,” Clueit said, “and it goes into how much training we’ll need to provide.” The server module wouldn’t be available before mid-2000 — if Willow commits to it, he added.

MQSeries is priced based on the number of CPUs the software is loaded on, starting at $3,000 for a one- or two-CPU license and including 12 months of upgrades and support.