Dalvik, running java efficiently

The story of virtual machines is beginning to be quite long ; Smalltalk, Lisp, Java, dotNet, ... The idea behind these were to be able to write once and deploy everywhere. In the case of Smalltalk, it was even a step further by including the concept of "image" which is actually a kind of object oriented database.
The drawback of these approaches is mainly the lack of performance, even if many, many improvements has been made to ensure execution celerity (hotspot for instance)... But the constatation is in front of our eyes : eclipse is still a big processor and memory consummer, microsoft doesn't still write its main applications in dotNet, and so on...
One of the avantage of using VM is that the developper can develop quicker and safer (no more memory leaks for instance). We could easily continue to develop this way but by adding a compilation step we could ensure efficiency. It is what Excelsior proposes, but also IS2T with their Icetea technology.
Google followed the same way by providing the Dalvik technology, ie a VM running .dex files directly got from java .class files. This new format is shorter, quicker, more memory efficient but has not just-in-time compiler. This VM enables Google to run java programs on Android efficiently, and also not to pay fees to Sun ;)

Google Native Client

Google continues to walk on the flower-bed of Microsoft, Adobe and Sun by providing regularly technologies to render it auto-suffisient and universal.
Google has just published the first development version of Google Native Client. As said by Google, "Native Client is an open-source research technology for running x86 native code in web applications, with the goal of maintaining the browser neutrality, OS portability, and safety that people expect from web apps. We've released this project at an early, research stage to get feedback from the security and broader open-source communities. We believe that Native Client technology will someday help web developers to create richer and more dynamic browser-based applications."
With GWT, Android, Chrome, Ad-sens, ..., Google is going a step ahead...
The FAQ gives further information about this technology.