Page History

On the surface, both publishing and activation, that is their modules and associated apps serve the same purpose: publish content from an author instance to a public instance:

The Nevertheless, the internals of this process are , however, different:

• 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 activation. The original Activation module has been broken into multiple Publishing submodules. The driving decision was to have a set of maintainable and extensible components. Another reason was to remove deprecated code. The core activation concepts remained the same. Despite the transport layer is still using the HTTP protocol, publishing allows to easily plug in any type of transport layer.

...