MQSI customers will get a free upgrade to this release, and they should welcome it because Version 2.0 has so many significant new features that it's virtually a new product. Solaris and AIX versions are scheduled to ship in August. MQSI isn't cheap. Nevertheless, MQSeries is the market's leading message-queuing product, and we found MQSI a very attractive technology that delivers new approaches to building MQSeries applications. Microsoft Corp.'s upcoming BizTalk Server has routing and message transformation facilities similar to those in MQSI, so it's also worth investigating as an application integration product, but BizTalk Server won't be out until later this year.
Shipping is a feature, as they say.
MQSI uses a visual message flowchart to describe applications, and we were able to create simple but complete applications that did message routing and transformation in less than an hour once we were familiar with the package. This is a far cry from previous MQSeries application development we've done that required C or Java knowledge. MQSI programming is based on the product's palette of built-in actions, which it calls primitives. We could add information to fields to specify valid data, but MQSI 2.0 does not actually check the additions, instead using them only for documentation. A future MQSI release would enable users to enforce data specifications, IBM officials said.