JMS Topic vs Queues

Question

I was wondering what is the difference between a JMS Queue and JMS Topic.

ActiveMQ page says

Topics

In JMS a Topic implements publish and subscribe semantics. When you publish a message it goes to all the subscribers who are interested - so zero to many subscribers will receive a copy of the message. Only subscribers who had an active subscription at the time the broker receives the message will get a copy of the message.

Queues

A JMS Queue implements load balancer semantics. A single message will be received by exactly one consumer. If there are no consumers available at the time the message is sent it will be kept until a consumer is available that can process the message. If a consumer receives a message and does not acknowledge it before closing then the message will be redelivered to another consumer. A queue can have many consumers with messages load balanced across the available consumers.

I want to have 'something' what will send a copy of the message to each subscriber in the same sequence as that in which the message was received by the ActiveMQ broker.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

That means a topic is appropriate. A queue means a message goes to one and only one possible subscriber. A topic goes to each and every subscriber.

Answer 2

Topics are for the publisher-subscriber model, while queues are for point-to-point.

Answer 3

A JMS topic is the type of destination in a 1-to-many model of distribution. The same published message is received by all consuming subscribers. You can also call this the 'broadcast' model. You can think of a topic as the equivalent of a Subject in an Observer design pattern for distributed computing. Some JMS providers efficiently choose to implement this as UDP instead of TCP. For topic's the message delivery is 'fire-and-forget' - if no one listens, the message just disappears. If that's not what you want, you can use 'durable subscriptions'.

A JMS queue is a 1-to-1 destination of messages. The message is received by only one of the consuming receivers (please note: consistently using subscribers for 'topic client's and receivers for queue client's avoids confusion). Messages sent to a queue are stored on disk or memory until someone picks it up or it expires. So queues (and durable subscriptions) need some active storage management, you need to think about slow consumers.

In most environments, I would argue, topics are the better choice because you can always add additional components without having to change the architecture. Added components could be monitoring, logging, analytics, etc. You never know at the beginning of the project what the requirements will be like in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years. Change is inevitable, embrace it :-)

Answer 4

It is simple as that:

Queues = Insert > Withdraw (send to single subscriber) 1:1

Topics = Insert > Broadcast (send to all subscribers) 1:n

Answer 5

As for the order preservation, see this ActiveMQ page. In short: order is preserved for single consumers, but with multiple consumers order of delivery is not guaranteed.

Answer 6

If you have N consumers then:

JMS Topics deliver messages to N of N JMS Queues deliver messages to 1 of N

You said you are "looking to have a 'thing' that will send a copy of the message to each subscriber in the same sequence as that in which the message was received by the ActiveMQ broker."

So you want to use a Topic in order that all N subscribers get a copy of the message.

Answer 7

Queues

Pros

• Simple messaging pattern with a transparent communication flow
• Messages can be recovered by putting them back on the queue

Cons

• Only one consumer can get the message
• Implies a coupling between producer and consumer as it’s an one-to-one relation

Topics

Pros

• Multiple consumers can get a message
• Decoupling between producer and consumers (publish-and-subscribe pattern)

Cons

• More complicated communication flow
• A message cannot be recovered for a single listener

Answer 8

TOPIC:: topic is one to many communication... (multipoint or publish/subscribe) EX:-imagine a publisher publishes the movie in the youtub then all its subscribers will gets notification.... QUEVE::queve is one-to-one communication ... Ex:-When publish a request for recharge it will go to only one qreciever ... always remember if request goto all qreceivers then multiple recharge happened so while developing analyze which is fit for a application

Answer 9

Queue is JMS managed object used for holding messages waiting for subscribers to consume. When all subscribers consumed the message , message will be removed from queue.

Topic is that all subscribers to a topic receive the same message when the message is published.