Relation to NATS

It means that Streaming clients are not directly connected to the streaming server, but instead communicate with the streaming server through NATS Server.

It is therefore strongly recommended for clients to close their connection when the application exits, otherwise the server will consider these clients connected (sending data, etc…) until it detects missing heartbeats.

Note that NATS clients and NATS Streaming clients cannot exchange data between each other. That is, if a streaming client publishes on , a NATS client subscribing on that same subject will not receive the messages. Streaming messages are NATS messages made of a protobuf. The streaming server is expected to send ACKs back to producers and receive ACKs from consumers. If messages were freely exchanged with the NATS clients, this would cause problems.