14. A computer program product comprising: a computer-usable storage medium having stored thereon computer-usable program code that, when executed by a system comprising a processor and a memory, causes the system to perform a method of processing an Extensible Markup Language (XML) document, the method comprising: loading an execution plan into a virtual machine, wherein the virtual machine consists of XML processing functions and the execution plan represents an XML schema; selectively invoking XML processing functions available within the virtual machine according to the execution plan, wherein the XML processing functions operate upon an XML document conforming to the XML schema represented by the execution plan; selectively invoking a de-serialization module according to the execution plan, wherein the de-serialization module is configured as a plug-in of the virtual machine and de-serializes at least one item of information from the XML document; and outputting the de-serialized item of information.
19. The computer program product of claim 14 , wherein the de-serialization module is incorporated into the virtual machine through an XML extension and performs at least one additional schema related processing function.