The third edition of Rails will see an overhaul of the framework to merge the philosophies and features of the Merb framework into Rails. Among other things, that includes providing support for ORMs like DataMapper, Sequel (and even Hibernate!) and for JavaScript libraries like jQuery and Dojo. In this talk, Yehuda will go deeper, explaining some of the details of the work: how Rails is becoming ORM agnostic, some of the more significant performance enhancements, and some of the more interesting refactoring experiences of the transition.