The described technology relates to a publish-subscribe message framework in which an application, decomposed to a plurality of processing stages, is run by executing respective processing stages of the application asynchronously and simultaneously with each other. Communications between the respective processing stages may exclusively be in accordance with the publish-subscribe execution model. The described publish-subscribe framework provides for processing stages to be executed in a multi-process and/or multi-threaded manner while also enabling the distribution of the processing stages to respective processing resources in a multi-processor/multi-core processing environment. An example electronic exchange application and a corresponding example exchange gateway application are described.