## Introduction to the REST Protocol

### Overview

The REST protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol that enables you to contact the message broker through a Web browser. You can contact the message broker by navigating to appropriately formatted URLs or by posting HTML forms.

### Transport protocols

The FUSE Message Broker’s REST protocol is based on a subset of the HTTP protocol. Hence, HTTP is the only supported transport.

### Supported clients

REST supports the following client types:

- Web forms—use conventional HTML forms to `POST` a message to a destination (queue or topic) or to `GET` a message from a destination—see Example of posting a message .

- Ajax clients—an Asynchronous JavaScript And Xml (Ajax) library that enables you to communicate with a REST endpoint using JavaScript in a DHTML Web page. For details of how to program an Ajax client, see the Cross Language Client Development Guide.

### REST servlets

The REST protocol is implemented by the following servlets running in a Web container:

- `message` servlet—supports the sending and consuming of messages.

- `queueBrowse` servlet—enables you to view the current status of a particular queue.