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. Now it’s followed up with the first of what may be more releases 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.