Also, is the implication that the merit of the tool is decided based on your personal liking/disliking for the language it is implemented in? That seems childish! If you are responsible for any decent business, dangerous!
- a .war for deploying in a standard 3.0 servlet container
- a self contained executable war that has a embedded jetty http server
For the self contained option, you only need a working java 7 runtime. I don't think that I can do it simpler than that.
Additionally, if you prefer an even more automated way of updating the software, the application is available on maven central, so you could (as we are currently doing it in our openshift instance) use the maven jetty plugin and select the depedency.
I can't really think of a simpler deploy system. (except statically linked binary, obviously, but there you need to select the correct os :))
edit: we have a docker image for testing purpose too.