If you have been following the press recently, you would be led to believe that Microsoft is forcing the entire industry to submit to using Windows and its technologies everywhere. With MSMQ, this is completely false. MSMQ is designed to be both platform and protocol independent. This will mean that any system that can be reached via a network, and understands the messaging protocol of MSMQ, can participate as a client or a message router. While the initial release of MSMQ is for Windows NT and Windows 95, third parties are already working on developing support for non-Windows clients. One of these third parties, Level 8 Systems (
), will have support for many platforms including IBM MVS and CICS, Sun Solaris, HP-UNIX, and AIX UNIX platforms, as well as OS/2, VMS, and AS/400 platforms. Their product also supports the mapping of native IBM MQSeries API (MQI) calls and CICS Transient Data API calls to the MSMQ API calls. With this support, it is apparent that no matter what type of application or what platform it is running, developers can take advantage of the features of message queuing and the support offered by Microsoft Message Queue Server.http://www.level8.com
Next, we will take a look at the last step in the case study that we have examined over the past two chapters. In this final step, we will look at how to use MSMQ to help us fulfill the book order.