Setting up cucumber environment for testing a remote restful API

[Larry Siden]

I want to use Cucumber to test a remote, restful PHP app.  I just want to send simple GET requests and one POST request (aka curl) for logging on.  I don't really need to emulate a browser and navagate pages.  I just want to check the HTTP status, save the session cookie, and parse the JSON that gets returned.

What is the easiest way to accomplish this for cucumber?  Do I use Webrat, Mechanize, Selenium, some combination of them, or something else?  I am reading the online docs, but not sure what each gem does that distinguishes it for my purposes.

I used Cucumber to test a restful API on my own localhost with Rack-Test and it worked great, but this time I think the setup needs to be different and I'm not sure where to start.