What is a Topic?

Publish-subscribe is an asynchronous messaging paradigm, where messages are addressed to topics, rather than specific recipients. All subscribers subscribed to a given topic then receive a copy of any event message published on that topic.

It is common for publish-subscribe infrastructure to involve published messages being sent to an intermediary broker. The broker manages the subscriptions and routing of messages to the appropriate subscribers. Such a broker would normally queue published messages for later delivery where subscribers are unavailable.

In other implementations, the message routing function is pushed out directly to the end points thus eliminating the need for the broker. In these cases, multiple copies of the message are sent directly from the publisher to each of the subscribers. This can be optimised at the network layer by associating topics with IP multicast groups so only a single copy of a published message is sent over the wire.

As explained in my post on defining an endpoint, the endpoints of a service are the endpoints of the channels controlled or owned by that service. In the case where an asynchronous queued transport such as MSMQ is employed, the endpoint will have an associated physical queue associated with it from which the service reads the messages addressed to that endpoint. The endpoint address shares the address of the queue. Moreover, the queue is owned by the endpoint. That is, it should not be shared between endpoints, and certainly not between services.

In the case of a publish-subscribe endpoint, the endpoint has an associated topic onto which the service publishes messages. The topic is owned by the service endpoint, and the endpoint address in this case is the address of the topic. As was the case with a queue, a topic should not be shared between endpoints, and certainly not between services.

In some publish/subscribe implementations, topics can be arranged in a hierarchy. Subscriptions can then be performed against a topic wildcard, rather than being limited to only one topic. This means a subscriber can receive notifications published to a topic as well as any topic underneath it in the hierarchy.

For instance we may have the following topics:



A subscriber that subscribes to org.sales.* will be sent all messages published to org.sales and all of its child topics, whereas a subscription to org.sales will only result in receipt of messages published specifically on that topic.