Let's say your cluster's members are:

Members [5] {
    Member [10.20.17.1:5701]
    Member [10.20.17.2:5701]
    Member [10.20.17.4:5701]
    Member [10.20.17.3:5701]
    Member [10.20.17.5:5701]
 }

And you have a distributed map named 'stocks'. You can put a new key1/value1 entry into this map by issuing HTTP POST call to http://10.20.17.1:5701/hazelcast/rest/maps/stocks/key1 URL. Your http post call's content body should contain the value (value1). You can retrieve this entry via HTTP GET call to http://10.20.17.1:5701/hazelcast/rest/maps/stocks/key1. You can also retrieve this entry from another member such ashttp://10.20.17.3:5701/hazelcast/rest/maps/stocks/key1.

RESTful access is provided through any member of your cluster. So you can even put an HTTP load-balancer in-front of your cluster members for load-balancing and fault-tolerance.

Now go ahead and install a REST plugin for your browser and explore further.

Hazelcast also stores the mime-type of your POST request if it contains any. So if, for example, you post binary of an image file and set the mime-type of the HTTP POST request to image/jpeg then this mime-type will be part of the response of your HTTP GET request for that entry.

Let's say you also have a task queue named 'tasks'. You can offer a new item into the queue via HTTP POST and take and item from the queue via HTTP DELETE.

HTTP POST http://10.20.17.1:5701/hazelcast/rest/queues/tasks <CONTENT> means

Hazelcast.getQueue("tasks").offer(<CONTENT>);

and HTTP DELETE http://10.20.17.1:5701/hazelcast/rest/queues/tasks/3 means

Hazelcast.getQueue("tasks").poll(3, SECONDS);

Note that you will have to handle the failures on REST polls as there is no transactional guarantee.