While the Ruby language and the Rails framework (Ruby on Rails, or RoR) have greatly simplified development of database-driven websites, the biggest knock has been the lack of commercial tooling.

Last spring, FiveRuns, which develops open source tooling that manages the popular LAMP (Linux, Apache webserver, MySQL database, and either the Perl, Python, or PHP dynamic scripting languages), began rolling out tools for managing and deploying Ruby. Since entering final release this summer, FiveRuns has seen over a million downloads of its Ruby on Rails tooling.

Now it's followed up with the first of what may be more releases of tooling for Sun’s Java-flavored counterpart, JRuby.

JRuby is similar to Ruby, except that it runs atop the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and uses Java instead of the original C libraries. As such, Sun is working to make JRuby act and look as much like Ruby as possible, but it is not a 100% match. Sun expects to finalize JRuby 1.1 by year end.

The first FiveRuns tool that is to come out is RM-Manage, which instruments JRuby to check for bottlenecks and track utilization, caching, and database connections. At this point, that’s the only piece definitely in the pipeline as, at this point, FiveRuns is still gauging demand for JRuby. So it’s holding off on RM Install, which is the core set of libraries for JRuby (they already have an equivalent for Ruby).

FiveRuns is also developing other tools for Ruby itself, covering application profiling (RM-Develop), deployment (providing a GUI-based version of the open source Capistrano utility (to be called RM-Deploy); and end-to-end monitoring from server to client (to be called RM-End to End). It does not at this point have plans to extend these tools to JRuby.

Oliver Thierry, vice president of marketing for FiveRuns, believes that Sun’s support of its own Java Ruby dialect will fill the hole for big vendor support that larger organizations are looking for.

But of course, the fact that JRuby is not identical to Ruby brings questions of whether the JVM version represents a forking of technology, which ironically, is exactly the problem that Sun has fought through the JCP. When we spoke with Charles Nutter, the core developer at Sun for JRuby, he told us that Sun’s goal was too keep its own dialect as close to the original as possible. With version 1.1, Nutter claims that JRuby compatibility with the mother tongue “has improved.”

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