Answer:   Topics: 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'.

Queue : 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.