Let me repeat that: ANY Java library in the world, installable as a gem. This means you can also use Maven artifacts as dependencies in regular Ruby gems, and it additionally means we won't have to re-release jar files into their own duplicate gems on the standard repositories. It's very exciting.
The second project is Polyglot Maven, which was started by Jason van Zyl and the folks at Sonatype.
That project intends to provide standard DSLs for popular JVM languages, allowing you to use those languages in place of the XML-based POM files so many people hate.
To read the entire interview with JRuby's Charles Nutter, click here.