Gemstone characteristic that lends value to a gemstone. Apart from jewelry, from earliest antiquity engraved gems and hardstone carvings, such as cups, were major luxury art forms. A gem maker is called a lapidary or gemcutter; a diamond cutter is called a diamantaire. The traditional classification in the West, which goes back to the ancient Greeks, begins with a distinction between "precious" and "semi-precious"; similar distinctions are made in other cultures. In modern use the precious stones are diamond, ruby, sapphire and emerald, with all other gemstones being semi-precious. This distinction reflects the rarity of the respective stones in ancient times,
Gemstone (database) of VMware, announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire GemStone. On May 2, 2013, GemTalk Systems acquired the GemStone/S platform from Pivotal Software (the EMC and VMware spin-off).. Gemfire remained with Pivotal's Big Data division. The product is available standalone but is also integrated into its Cloud Foundry PaaS as "Pivotal Cloud Cache". GemStone builds on the programming language Smalltalk. GemStone systems serve as mission-critical applications. GemStone frameworks still see some interest for web services and service-oriented architectures. A recent revival of interest in Smalltalk has occurred as a result of its use to generate JavaScript for