To oversimplify only slightly, MQ is a transport and Web services is (are) a protocol. It's quite OK, even common, to run Web services over a JMS/MQ transport.
If you say you want to use Web services instead of MQ, it's a bit like saying you want to use voicemail instead of a cellular telephone network. "Instead" isn't exactly the right word to connect those two concepts. You could say something like "We want to use Web services with a transport other than JMS or MQ" or "We want to use Web services with an HTTPS transport." That might be fine or might not. If the vendor application supports that, if it works, if it meets the non-functional requirements (reliability, performance, maintainability, recoverability, etc.), and if the business case is the strongest, then that's the approach I'd pick. If not, then not. Does the vendor support Web services for integrating their application? With what transport(s)? So far we only know about three available choices: MQ, JMS, and Microsoft Message Queuing. Are CICS-based application(s) the other party(ies) to the interaction(s) with this vendor application? Or some other type of application on the mainframe? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples Resident Enterprise Architect (Based in Singapore) E-Mail: timothy.sipp...@us.ibm.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html