Extending the Message Flow Debugger for MQSI

Integration and management of applications play key roles in today’s computing. MQSeries is an asynchronous, assured application-to-application communication protocol designed to support the integration of business processes. MQSeries Integrator (MQSI) is a component of MQSeries providing support for application integration and communication. The key technology in MQSI is the notion of a message flow. A message flow is a sequence of operations on a message, performed by a series of message processing nodes. A message flow developer creates a message flow by including processing nodes and connectors between them. Errors in the development of large and complex message flows are unavoidable, hence the need for a message flow debugger. A prototype debugger for message flows was developed at IBM Research Lab in Haifa. In this paper, techniques are presented that extend the prototype debugger to deal with multithreaded and nested message flows. In addition, we discuss how the performance of the debugger can be improved to meet production standards.