Integrating a ruby environment into a Java maven project is quite easy. I recently built BlenderCss, a java project that needed to use the Compass gem. To solution was to utilize the gem via jruby.

You will need..

1. Dependencies Section in pom.xml
...
<!-- The Jruby Dependency -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.jruby</groupId>
    <artifactId>jruby</artifactId>
    <version>1.7.12</version>
</dependency>
...

2. The ruby class you plan to use.

class MyApi

end

JRubyRunner.java

 1 import org.jruby.Ruby;
 2 import org.jruby.javasupport.JavaEmbedUtils;
 3 
 4 import java.util.ArrayList;
 5 import java.util.List;
 6 
 7 public class JRubyRunner {
 8     public static void main(String[] args) {
 9         List paths = new ArrayList();
10         paths.add("classpath:gems/compass-0.12.2/lib");
11         Ruby ruby = JavaEmbedUtils.initialize(paths);
12         ruby.getLoadService().require("compass");  // require "compass"
13         ruby.evalScriptlet("Compass::Exec::SubCommandUI.perform! :compile"); // perform a compile command.
14     }
15 }

Note: jRuby is slow to initialize, so use it wisely.