Synchronous subscriptions require the application to wait for messages. This type of subscription is easy to set-up and use, but requires the application to deal with looping if multiple messages are expected. For situations where a single message is expected, synchronous subscriptions are sometimes easier to manage, depending on the language.
For example, to subscribe to the subject updates and receive a single message you could do:
!INCLUDE "../../_examples/subscribe_sync.html"