A while back I was trying to do some initial tries at Ruby as a scripting language with JRuby. That means that I had a Java system, but needed to do some util scripting for the system, and wanted to avoid those pesky bash scripts. Because I had a Java system and Maven infrastructure in place I really wanted it all to work nicely with that. But the whole Ruby and gem ecosystem threw me a bit off. Long story short: I never quite figured out how to do that and had to move on getting things done.
Madaspeak has a nice post showing how you can run Cucumber in Maven as tests for your Java classes. Cucumber is an interesting BDD framework from Aslak Hellesøy, and in the process you can also learn how to enable running of JRuby in Maven.