JBehave for testing REST web-application

I'm working on a project which receives json data via REST and after some processing sends them further. I.e. it has both HTTP-server and HTTP-client parts.

Now I'm told to add integration tests to them and was proposed to use Citrus framework. I see it has citrus-http module, but after setting all things up I do not feel very happy with it for I do not want write tests in XML (while it is required they should not be written in compiled code).

So I started to think about using JBehave, but I have no experience with testing http with it - and I could not find necessary examples at once. It seems I need to start http server, send some data with http client and check the result on the server. But are there any modules or JBehave-friendly framework for providing this "http" part - or I should create them from scratch?