In a publish/subscribe model, there is a timing dependency. A client that subscribes to a topic can consume only messages published after the client has created a subscription, and the subscriber must continue to be active in order for it to consume messages.

The JMS API relaxes this timing dependency to some extent by allowing subscribers to create durable  subscriptions, which receive messages sent while the subscribers are not active. Durable subscriptions provide the flexibility and reliability of queues but still allow clients to send messages to many recipients. Durable subscriptions offer the reliability of queues to the publish/subscribe message domain.