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On the surface, both publishing and activation modules and the associated apps do the same thing: publish content from an author instance to a public instance:

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• Activation is an older implementation inherited from the 5.5 branch, which can nevertheless still be used in the 5.6 branch. 
• Publishing is a refactored successor to the activation.  The original Activation module has been refactored and split broken into multiple modules.Driving reason for the activation rewrite was to split activation into set of maintanable Publishing submodules. The driving decision was to have a set of maintainable and extensible components. Another reason was to remove deprecated code usages.

  Base activation concepts remained unchanged. Transport layer is still using HTTP protocol. However new publishing implementation allows to easily plug in any type of transport layer.

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