3.2.2. The Publish-Subscribe Pattern

With publish-subscribe messaging, many senders can send messages to an entity on the server, often called a topic (it is used this way in the JMS world, for example).

There can be many subscriptions on a topic; a subscription is just another word for a consumer of a topic. Each subscription receives a copy of each message sent to the topic. This differs from the message queue pattern where each message is only consumed by a single consumer.

Subscriptions can optionally be durable, which means they retain a copy of each message sent to the topic until the subscriber consumes them - even if the server crashes or is restarted in between. Non-durable subscriptions only last a maximum of the lifetime of the connection that created them.

An example of publish-subscribe messaging would be a news feed. As news articles are created by different editors around the world they are sent to a news feed topic. There are many subscribers around the world who are interested in receiving news items - each one creates a subscription and the messaging system ensures that a copy of each news message is delivered to each subscription.