finally realized the answer to my question is "you can't." In case there are other newbies to Camel and Rest out there, I was able to run against drools-server using xstream with the following code: import org.apache.commons.httpclient.Header; import org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient; import org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.PostMethod; import org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.StringRequestEntity; import org.apache.commons.httpclient.params.HttpClientParams; import org.drools.command.BatchExecutionCommand; import org.drools.command.Command; import org.drools.command.CommandFactory; import org.drools.runtime.help.impl.BatchExecutionHelperProviderImpl; import org.drools.runtime.impl.ExecutionResultImpl; List commands = new ArrayList<Command>(); commands.add(CommandFactory.newSetGlobal("logger", logger)); commands.add(CommandFactory.newInsert(fact)); // fact == my domain object commands.add(CommandFactory.newFireAllRules()); BatchExecutionCommand batchCommand = CommandFactory.newBatchExecution(commands, "workflowKnowledgeSession"); BatchExecutionHelperProviderImpl helper = new BatchExecutionHelperProviderImpl(); String xml = helper.newXStreamMarshaller().toXML(batchCommand); // create http client to perform the post HttpClient httpClient = new HttpClient(); httpClient.getHostConfiguration().setHost("172.17.4.178", 8280); PostMethod postMethod = new PostMethod("/drools-server/kservice/rest/execute"); StringRequestEntity requestEntity = new StringRequestEntity(xml, "text/plain", "utf-8"); postMethod.setRequestEntity(requestEntity); httpClient.executeMethod(postMethod); assertEquals(200, postMethod.getStatusCode()); Object result = helper.newXStreamMarshaller().fromXML(postMethod.getResponseBodyAsString()); I can see in the drools-server log that my knowledge session is being given the message, and my rule is firing (it writes to the server log). However, I am not getting anything in the response body. I will post that as a separate question. -- View this message in context: http://drools.46999.n3.nabble.com/rules-users-how-to-invoke-rest-service-... Sent from the Drools: User forum mailing list archive at Nabble.com.