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) web application server platform. (VisualWave and VisualWorks are now owned by Cincom.) GemStone played an important sponsorship role in the Smalltalk Industry Council at the time when IBM was backing VisualAge Smalltalk, now owned by Instantiations, Inc. After a major transition, GemStone for Smalltalk continued as "GemStone/S" and various C++ and Java products for scalable, multitier architecture distributed computing systems evolved into the "GemStone/J" product. This in turn gave rise to "GemFire", an early example of a Data Fabric for complex event processing (CEP), event stream processing (ESP), data virtualization, and distributed caching. On May 6, 2010, SpringSource, a division