The Icon Integration Toolkit is a set of tools, code samples, best practices, and utilities all designed to give customers a head start when implementing a solution using the IBM Websphere MQ and Message Broker product sets. Use of the Integration Toolkit has been proven to save considerable time both for customers implementing the technology for the first time, or those looking to improve or extend an existing installation. The Toolkit has a positive first-year ROI which is easy to calculate.

The Icon Integration Toolkit is made up of the following elements:

The ESB Reference Architecture is a set of documentation built up over years of developing and managing ESB solutions. It includes both design documentation and usage guidelines for the WebSphere Message Broker flows, as well as technology-agnostic templates for aiding analysis and architectural thinking.

The WebSphere Message Broker Accelerator provides a foundation layer for a WebSphere Message Broker deployment, with a proven design and development approach created over a number of engagements. It provides pre-written components that implement best practices required by a true ESB solution constructed using WebSphere Message Broker - which are not provided out of the box by IBM.

Based on the popular JUnit framework, MQUnit is a unit testing utility integrated with the WebSphere Message Broker development environment that allows developers to carry out automated testing of their message flows and procedures. Used within a test-driven development environment, it can reduce the risk of change and addition to the code base and reduce the cost of regression testing. It can also be integrated with Ant, the recommended build tool for WebSphere Message Broker, to ensure that no code changes break the build.

MQMonitor is a simple but powerful monitoring tool that is user-configurable to monitor MQ queues and channels and email the administrator should any channel fail, any queue fills up, or any message appears on a dead-letter queue. It is targeted at smaller organisations who need a standalone monitoring solution, and also at larger corporate who have invested in an enterprise monitoring system which now needs to also integrate the monitoring of MQ objects.

MQViewer is a web-based system that allows MQ administrators to quickly check the configuration and status of a remote MQ queue manager via a web interface. Administrators can see all queue manager, queue and channel information, including channel status, queue depth, etc. MQViewer can be configured so that users are allowed to stop and start queue managers remotely or to run in read-only mode where it will not be able to make any changes to the remote system. This makes it compliant with most corporate access policies.

Each element in the Integration Toolkit can be purchased separately. Please speak to our sales department to find out more – or to arrange for a demonstration from one of our technical consultants.