Here's the deal: a friend of mine is taking a computer hardware/software/OS class which seems to hit on some technical topics in a very specific manner. I posted up my depiction of his description of the diagram that his instructor gave him to understand and study, but he doesn't know how to decipher it, and what it means exactly. any chance of help and input to give some hint of what this diagram is getting at? I posted up what I drew from his description at: http://e.1asphost.com/elchlepp/java_diagram.html As always, thanks in advance. Chuck

this should help .. should be a pretty quick read http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/getStarted/intro/definition.html

Okay, Java uses a JVM as a middleman, to perform memory management, some optimization, mask the complexity and uniqueness of the native hardware, and create psuedocode (bytecode). The compiler doesn't create a binary executable. Instead, it creates a bytecode file which can be read/executed by the JVM (via the interpreter, a parser of sorts). In theory (i.e. it's not totally true), code can be written and compiled once, then run natively on any system via the local JVM. The JVM interprets the code for the CPU at runtime.