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📩🧵 JAVA MESSAGING SERVICE (JMS) — QUEUES VS TOPICS

February 13, 2026

🔸 TLDR

▪️ Queue = 1 message → 1 consumer (work distribution) ✅

▪️ Topic = 1 message → N subscribers (broadcast) 📣

▪️ Durable subscription = don’t miss messages while offline 🧷

🔸 CONTEXT (WHAT JMS IS, WITHOUT THE HYPE)

▪️ JMS is a Java API for messaging (asynchronous communication) between apps 📨

▪️ It’s about exchanging messages through a broker (ex: ActiveMQ, Artemis, IBM MQ…)

🧩 ▪️ Two main models: Queue (point-to-point) vs Topic (pub/sub) 🔀

🔸 MESSAGE QUEUES (POINT-TO-POINT) 📬

▪️ Producer sends to a queue

▪️ Consumers compete: each message is handled by only one consumer

▪️ Great for: background jobs, email sending, payments processing, retries ⚙️

Send a message to a queue

Receive a message from a queue

🔸 MESSAGE TOPICS (PUBLISH / SUBSCRIBE) 📣

▪️ Producer publishes to a topic

▪️ Every subscriber gets a copy (fan-out) 🌪️

▪️ Great for: domain events, notifications, cache invalidation, audit streams 🧠

Publish to a topic

Subscribe to a topic

🔸 TAKEAWAYS ✅

▪️ Use Queue when you want work to be processed once (load-balanced consumers) ⚖️

▪️ Use Topic when you want broadcast (many services react to the same event) 📡

▪️ Use Durable Subscribers when subscribers must not miss messages (even offline) 🧱

▪️ JMS is an API: behavior depends on your broker + config (delivery mode, ack, redelivery…) 🔧

🔸 QUESTION FOR YOU 🤔

▪️ In your projects: are you mostly Queue-first or Topic-first?

#Java #JMS #Messaging #EventDrivenArchitecture #Integration #Microservices #Backend #Architecture #JavaDevelopers #AsyncProcessing

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