<p>I'm looking at ways to deploy a Ruby on Rails app (running on JRuby) to a Tomcat instance for testing.</p>

<p>The tomcat instance is running on a Solaris server that I can SSH to. I've looked at using Capistrano, but there doesn't seem to be a lot out there about using it to deploy to Tomcat, or even about running it under JRuby, and I keep hitting bugs in Capistrano due to the Windows/JRuby environment my PC is running (yeah, it's corporate - not my choice, but I've got to live with it).</p>

<p>I'm using warble to build the .war file, and the app deploys and runs fine once I manually copy it up and deploy it. I'm wanting something easier and more automated to actually get it there.</p>

<p>Anyone done this before? Documentation on the web seems pretty thin.</p>

I don't have much experience on this, so I don't know if I can give you the BEST way, but if Capistrano doesn't work, and you can't have a separate MRI install just to run it, you have just a few alternatives left:
Try running plain Rake and write your own deployment target:
http://www.gra2.com/article.php/deploy-ruby-on-rails-applications-rake
Or use Ant or Maven.
Or if it just ONE server you have to deploy to, you could just hack together two Ruby scripts - one that listens on the server for shutdown/startup requests, and one local that you run to: Send shutdown, scp over the file, send startup.
By the way, have you submitted any integration bugs you find with Capistrano to the JRuby team? I'm sure they'd be happy to have any contribution.
:)