Packaging Ruby or Python applications for distribution?
You can either distribute the app as a virtual machine or create an installer that includes all dependencies, like the GitHub guys did for their on-premise version.
Are there any good options other than the JVM for packaging Python or Ruby applications for distribution to end-users?  Specifically, I'm looking for ways to be able to write and test a web-based application written in either Ruby or Python, complete with a back-end database, that I can then wrap up in a convenient set of platform-independent packages (of some type) for deployment on Windows, Linux, OS X, and FreeBSD?
Edit: What I mean by a 'web-based application' is a webapp that end-users can run on servers at their companies, providing a web service internally to their end-users.  There are a lot of ways to do this on the JVM via JPython or JRuby, but I'm curious if there's a non-JVM route with alternate VMs or interpreters.