Migration tool for WebSphere MQ

The article Evolutionary Database Design written by Martin Fowler explains why migration tools are important:

Over the last decade we've developed and refined a number of techniques that allow a database design to evolve as an application develops. This is a very important capability for agile methodologies. The techniques rely on applying continuous integration and automated refactoring to database development, together with a close collaboration between DBAs and application developers.

Replace database with WebSphere MQ and DBAs with MQ administrators in the introduction of this article and you get the goal of this project. There are a lot of migration tools for managing the schemas of databases (like Phinx for example). The goal of this project is to create such a tool for managing the objects of WebSphere MQ : define queues, remove queues, define channels, set security, ...

There are two ways of managing queuemanager objects:

• MQSC commands
• PCF commands

MQSC commands are processed by the runmqsc commandline tool of WebSphere MQ. The migration tool must be capable of writing these commands in a file and pass it to runmqsc.

PCF commands are actually MQSC commands that are send as a message to the command server of the queuemanager. For this you need a script or a tool that can send PCF messages to a queuemanager. There are MQ bindings (Python for example) that allow scripts to create such messages. Use MQWeb is another possibility.

Currently this project is in an experimental phase.