A venture capital firm asked us many months ago to use our knowledge and connections in the Ruby community to gather information and create a white paper that mapped the ecosystem that has built up around the Ruby language and the Rails development framework.

It was a major project involving a great deal of research, interviews and analysis. Many of the stories and background detail comes from our direct experiences at InfoEther -- much of it made available for the first time. The results are below -- free to download.

This download is a 7MB PDF. All of the links in the paper are active.

We learned from this experience that the community or "ecosystem" is dynamic and there is so much information that is constantly in flux that we have decided to make this a "living" document that we will continually update and refresh in periodic versions.

The Ruby and Rails Ecosystem is a very large and robust community of companies, entities and individuals. This paper is meant to be an educational introduction for the layman, investor or business executive.

We have not provided rankings or attempted to capture all available information on each company or technical topic. The ordering of listings is arbitrary and does not convey a ranking. Any opinion stated is our interpretation of the consensus of the community, or in some cases, purely our own.

We understand that information, companies, events and individuals may be missing from various tables and discussion topics. Much of the information in the various tables in each section was drawn directly from public Web sites, searches and interviews.

We expect feedback and have provided this email address to collect it: ecosystem@infoether.com

Rather than chart every library and technical nuance, the goal of this paper is to provide a high level view of the how and why of Ruby and Rails.

How to use them, apply them, gain from them.