Byte Code Transformations using XSL Stylesheets

Virtual machines (VMs) facilitate the deployment of applications in heterogeneous environments. Popular VMs such as Sun Microsystempsilas Java VM or Microsoftpsilas common language runtime (CLR) are based on stack-based machines to execute byte code instructions. Implementations of VMs are available for devices like cell phones, personal computers, or chip-cards. It is of obvious economic benefit to be able to map byte code instructions from one VM to the other. By doing so, developers for one VM can deploy their applications on the other VM. The CLR offers several features not found in the JVM. The focus of this paper is to map CLR byte code instructions to appropriate JVM instructions using a declarative approach by making extensive use of XML technologies. More specifically, we will show how to use XSL stylesheets to achieve the cross-compilation of CLR byte code instructions to the JVM.