The JavaOne conference in San Francisco this week puts a spotlight on running dynamic scripting languages and Visual Basic on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).“The point is, the Java platform is way bigger than the Java language,” said Tim Bray, Sun director of Web technologies. Projects discussed Tuesday in multiple JavaOne sessions included: * Quercus, which implements PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) on the JVM.* JRuby, running Ruby on the JVM.* Project Phobos, for server-side JavaScript. * Project Semplice, putting Visual Basic on the JVM.Running scripting languages on the JVM provides several benefits, Bray said. Java developers can take advantage of these scripting languages and non-Java developers can avail themselves to the JVM. Meanwhile, scripting languages get performance boosts.“One of the things all these dynamic languages tend to have is really lousy threading and concurrency,” Bray said. The JVM makes them run faster, he said. Software Development