A client is an object on the Broker that represents the connection between a client program and the Broker. A client program creates a client to publish or retrieve documents. A client might be created by a client program (using JMS, C#, or Java APIs), webMethods Integration Server (triggers), and My webMethods (clients for performing administrative tasks).

A client program publishes documents to a Broker Server using its client. The Broker Server's publishing engine routes documents published by a client to other clients that subscribe to those documents.

A client program subscribes to documents by registering document type subscriptions with its client. Broker places the documents to which a client subscribes in the client's queue. A client program then retrieves the documents from its client queue.

For example, a customer-facing Web application might create a client to publish sales order documents. The back-end accounting system and the order fulfillment systems might create their own clients to subscribe to the sales order documents. Broker routes the documents published by the Web applications client to the clients for the accounting and order fulfillment systems.

A client program creates a client using one of the Broker APIs. For more information about creating a Broker client, see the appropriate programming guide.