In accordance with an embodiment, described herein is a system and method for supporting REST services natively in a service bus runtime. The service bus runtime can include one or more native REST proxy services, one or more native REST pipelines, and one or more native REST reference services. A native REST proxy service can deliver a message payload of a REST native format into a native REST pipeline, which can process the payload without converting the payload to or from an XML-based Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) format. JavaScript code can be supported in the pipeline to manipulate the message payload. A REST branch node can be used in the service bus runtime to route a message based on an HTTP verb or a relative URL path in a header of the message.