Publish-subscribe pattern

In software architecture, publish–subscribe is a messaging pattern where senders of messages, called publishers, do not program the messages to be sent directly to specific receivers, called subscribers, but instead characterize published messages into classes without knowledge of which subscribers, if any, there may be. Similarly, subscribers express interest in one or more classes and only receive messages that are of interest, without knowledge of which publishers, if any, there are.

Publish–subscribe is a sibling of the message queue paradigm, and is typically one part of a larger message-oriented middleware system. Most messaging systems support both the pub/sub and message queue models in their API, e.g. Java Message Service (JMS).

This pattern provides greater network scalability and a more dynamic network topology, with a resulting decreased flexibility to modify the publisher and the structure of the published data.

In the publish–subscribe model, subscribers typically receive only a subset of the total messages published. The process of selecting messages for reception and processing is called filtering. There are two common forms of filtering: topic-based and content-based.

In a topic-based system, messages are published to "topics" or named logical channels. Subscribers in a topic-based system will receive all messages published to the topics to which they subscribe, and all subscribers to a topic will receive the same messages. The publisher is responsible for defining the classes of messages to which subscribers can subscribe.

In a content-based system, messages are only delivered to a subscriber if the attributes or content of those messages match constraints defined by the subscriber. The subscriber is responsible for classifying the messages.

Some systems support a hybrid of the two; publishers post messages to a topic while subscribers register content-based subscriptions to one or more topics.

In many pub/sub systems, publishers post messages to an intermediary message broker or event bus, and subscribers register subscriptions with that broker, letting the broker perform the filtering. The broker normally performs a store and forward function to route messages from publishers to subscribers. In addition, the broker may prioritize messages in a queue before routing.

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