Developing applications

You can develop applications to send and receive messages, and to manage your queue managers and related resources. IBM® MQ support applications written in procedural languages, and object oriented languages and frameworks.

Before you develop applications for IBM MQ, ensure you are familiar with the concepts in IBM MQ Technical overview.

Support for procedural programming languages

IBM MQ provides support for the following procedural programming languages:
  • C
  • Visual Basic ( Windows systems only)
  • COBOL
  • [z/OS]Assembler language ( IBM MQ for z/OS® only)
  • [IBMi]RPG ( IBM MQ for IBM i only)
  • [z/OS]PL/I ( IBM MQ for z/OS only)
These languages use the message queue interface (MQI) to access message queuing services. For more information, see Developing MQI applications with IBM MQ.

Support for object-oriented languages and frameworks

IBM MQ provides support for the following object-oriented programming languages and frameworks:
  • JMS
  • Java
  • C++
  • .NET
  • ActiveX
These languages and frameworks use the IBM MQ Object Model, which provides classes that provide the same functionality as IBM MQ calls and structures, but that are a more natural way of programming in an object-oriented environment. Some of the languages and frameworks that use the IBM MQ Object Model provide additional functions that are not available to the procedural languages using the MQI. For more information, see Object-oriented applications.