[chef] Is Chef a good fit for Java deployments?

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My company is looking at a way to automate Java deployments, and manage
environments. There are tools from the Java community that will automate
deployments, but they won't do configuration management more broadly, and none
of them are terribly well established. 

Our environments are relatively diverse, but to start with, we'd like to 
manage
a collection of apps running on Tomcat servers. We build with Maven and deploy
CI snapshots and releases to an internal Nexus repository. In an ideal world,
I'd like to be able to do two things:

1. When a new release occurs, tell Chef that test servers should receive that
release by incrementing the version number. Then have Chef download the
binaries from Nexus (which I'm sure it can do with its Maven resource), and
pass them to Tomcat. It seems to me this should be pretty easy.

2. On development servers, have Chef continuously check the snapshots on Nexus
and perform the same installation procedure when an update occurs. This also
seems like it's probably achievable.

What worries me is that Chef doesn't seem to be very widely used for Java
environments, and I'm wondering if there's a reason. Am I going down the wrong
road, or does it seem like this is a good fit?

For background, Chef will also need to configure agents for Logstash and 
Nagios
(which I know it can do), and update an XML file that defines Logback logging
configuration for Tomcat.