1. Within a system comprising a processor and a memory, a method of creating a schema specific parser for processing Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents, the method comprising: receiving an XML schema comprising a plurality of components; determining, via the processor, a hierarchy of the plurality of components of the XML schema and storing the hierarchy in a memory; creating, via the processor, an execution plan specifying a hierarchy of XML processing instructions, wherein each of said XML processing instructions is associated with an XML processing function of a virtual machine, wherein each XML processing function instructs the virtual machine to automatically perform a processing task upon an XML document, and said hierarchy of XML processing instructions is determined according to the hierarchy of components of the XML schema; inserting into the execution plan, via the processor, at least one instruction that causes the virtual machine to invoke a de-serialization module that extracts at least one item of information from the XML document; compiling, via the processor, the execution plan into a bytecode version of the execution plan that is interpretable by the virtual machine; and outputting the bytecode version of the execution plan to the memory.