My employer has an application running on WAS server 8.5.5. It uses MQ client adapter to connect to a MQ setup on version 7. Now my employer is upgrading to version 9 on the MQ but want to retain the WAS server at 8.5.5. Is this possible? In one of the IBM articles I saw the following:
The IBM MQ Version 9.0 resource adapter cannot be deployed into earlier versions of WebSphere Application Server, as these versions are not Java™ EE 7 certified.
If your question is specifically on traditional WAS (rather than Liberty profile), then the answer is yes.
tWAS bundles a level of MQ resource adapter, and this bundled RA inherits the support lifecycle of the application server. [This support does not apply to other versions of the MQ resource adapter that have been manually applied to the tWAS installation, and so using the bundled RA is generally recommended.]
Any supported MQ client can communicate with any supported MQ queue manager, as either side will negotiate the version of MQ communication flows in use down to the mutually appropriate level. This means that the MQ 7.1 resource adapter can communicate with a version 9.0 queue manager, although of course any connections that this client makes will not be eligible to use functionality added to the product after 7.1.