Deploying JVM web apps & productivity measures

Dear Scalarazzi and Lifted,
This is communication is intended to collect information. Recently, i was in the situation where i was deploying a mixed JRuby/Scala/CAL app up to the cloud. i was flummoxed at how difficult it was to track down and manage JRuby dependencies. i thought i was using state-of-the art tooling (like warbler) and current best practices. However, the quantitative productivity measure was staggering: 

• using tools like stax.net it takes me approximately 2 mins to deploy a lift or straightup scala+homegrown servlet app to AMZN; 
• it took me nearly two days to deploy the JRuby/Scala/CAL app -- and subsequent testing showed i'd still missed some resources. (And that doesn't include, by the way, the nontrivial number of hours spent transitioning from activerecord over mysql to activerecord over jdbc.) 

i think i must be doing something wrong in the latter context. What's the experience of folks on this list? Does anyone have numbers they've collected tracking time spent on web app deployment/maintenance for the relevant JVM web frameworks? i think this sort of question is particularly important in the commercial setting where total cost of ownership is a tricky number to calculate.
Best wishes,
--greg

--
L.G. Meredith
Managing Partner
Biosimilarity LLC
1219 NW 83rd St
Seattle, WA 98117

+1 206.650.3740

http://biosimilarity.blogspot.com