After reading some document of JMS, I totally puzzled by the phrase synchronous and asynchronouns.
See this page: http://docs.oracle.com/cd
You are looking at it end-to-end: from publisher to the consumer. Yes, it is asynchronous delivery from publisher to consumer irrespective of Sync/Async consumer. However Sync/Async in your question is for consumer only, i.e from the JMS broker (eg: ApacheMQ) to the consumer. As others have pointed out, Sync consumers pull messages sequentially from the broker and are waiting for messages. Async consumers register a callback where messages pushed to them (onMessage). Async consumers can go about doing other things while these messages are delivered to them asynchronously from the JMS broker.