In general, a REST Web Services exposes data and function resources through the use of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). These resources are used within simple, well-defined operations. HTTP methods are used by the REST services to point to a resource. Each HTTP request returns an HTTP response, which indicates the status of the operation. The application that receives the request identifies the format of the response, which is JSON or XML.

REST clients may be accessed from any browser, and security can be configured for each call.