Use memcache with JRuby

I have just started learning JRuby and should admit that it’s really a
nice
stuff, thanks for all your effort guys.
My problem is as following:

We have a live service(IMPS like service) running on RoR. But the
performance of some methods(like send_message)
is very low(we are not doing anything extraordinary there but still it
can
hardly handle 10-15 req/sec per mongrel).
We are using Java to push messages to clients(Persistent connection bwt
client/server). So, now we are thinking of moving
some of the functionality on Java side. But, on RoR side we are storing
some
objects in memcache server, so just thinking to
reuse those objects in Java.

My question is: is it possible to convert objects(stored by RoR)
returned by
memcache into Java/Ruby objects using JRuby?
Any pointers/suggestions will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.