Rhino Assistance and Small Program

I need help getting started with Rhino. I'm a very experienced programmer, but have very little Java background. I am having trouble getting the Rhino shell running, something about a class path and class not found when I run the shell. I'm sure this is pretty simple for anyone who's been doing Java or Rhino for more than a week. In addition to getting my environment set up, I have a little JavaScript program that I want to get running under Rhino. It should do the following: 1) Normalize a phone number by taking out all dashes, parenthesis and other non-numeric characters, leaving just a 10 digit number (US only) 2) It then needs to make a REST call to [login to view URL];api_key=API_KEYVAL passing in the phone number. This is apparently a little more complex under Rhino than it is under a web browser because of the importing of the HTTP libraries has to be done. I'm a little familiar with the nature of the problem, but need help figuring it out. 3) This api can return XML or JSON. If I understand right, creating an object from the JSON is simple, and I'd prefer to do that if it's not too hard. 4) I then need to access the individual fields of the object (or xml) returned by the call to the API and put them into a dictionary that would be passed in from Java code into the Rhino Javascript. I looked into this, and it looked to be fairly straight forward. All in all, this is a pretty small program, should be very simple to code up for someone fluent in JavaScript and especially Rhino. If you haven't used Rhino before, please don't bid on this project. I really just need a bit of handholding from someone who's been down this road before. The hardest part may be figuring out how to get me configured. Thanks for your consideration.