Virtual Machines

The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) was certainly not the first virtual machine (ADA, at least, was there before...), but it is a pretty popular one.
Several - if not many - languages can now be compiled into JVM byte code, and as such, they run for free wherever a JVM exists. Among them, Scala, Groovy, Clojure,... the list is long. In short, all they need to provide is a compiler, the runtime is provided by the JVM implementation.

On another thread, there is a language that becomes more and more popular, it's JavaScript, along with JavaScript Object Notation (json), and avro, that looks a bit for json like what XML Schema looks like for XML.

The interesting parallel between the JVM and JavaScript is that JavaScript runs inside a Web browser. From this point of view, the browser could be considered like a Virtual Machine as well... The implementation of the JavaScript engine is done by the browser vendor. And as a result, JavaScript does not care about what system it's running on; just (maybe) in which browser it's running in.

More to come about that..., stay tuned!