Candle Fires up New MQSeries Features
Candle Corp. (Santa Monica, Calif.) recently released an AS/400 version of a scaled-down toolset to be shipped with IBM’s MQSeries. This is the final deliverable of an agreement forged earlier this year between IBM and Candle, in which Candle middleware products would be packaged with MQSeries at no additional cost.
The features – incorporated as Candle Command Center Admin Pac into MQSeries – include editing, performance monitoring, and configuration tools expected to help keep MQSeries competitive with Microsoft’s MSMQ, says Barry Ader, director of middleware solutions for Candle.
In the initial phase, Candle’s editing tool, PQEdit, was made available to MQSeries users via no-cost downloads. Candle Command Center Admin Pac was made available over the summer on MVS, AIX, Windows NT, OS/2, HP-UX, and Sun Solaris. The latest phase, targeted at AS/400 sites, was released in early October.
Admin Pac is essentially a stripped-down version of Candle’s Management Pac, Ader explains. Admin Pac "lets you just look at the data and generate reports," he says. Management Pac, available on a fee basis, "helps you manage the system, by not only telling you what’s going wrong, but be able to take some action to fix it," he says.
MQSeries aids development of applications at multi-platform sites, Ader says, freeing "application programmers from having to worry about networking issues. They only need to focus on business logic."
In a separate development, Candle’s Java-based Candlelight for OS/400 systems management solution is being included on a software sampler CD shipped with every new copy of OS/400. CandleLight, another scaled-down version of Candle Command Center, manages more than 400 AS/400 system attributes and can monitor local and remote AS/400s from a central location.
Candle sources also confirm that the company is working on an AS/400 version of its Roma Business Services Platform (Roma BSP), a universal platform announced last summer that supports both MQSeries and MSMQ messaging, based on component, message queuing and (LDAP) directory technologies. No announcement date has been set.