I just found rest-assured (https://code.google.com/p/rest-assured/wiki/GettingStarted). I feel like this could be a much easier way of doing the testing and it would only introduce a new library (well, two if you count hamcrest) instead of a new library and a new language. You can see examples at https://code.google.com/p/rest-assured/wiki/Usage. This actually looks very intuitive and easy to use. I'd like to redact my previous request and suggest rest-assured in place of Spock and Groovy.