One of the goals of SCORM is to make courseware plug-and-play with any LMS. Administrators of online learning want to know that the logic embedded in their courses--including the ability to store application state and student progress information on the server--will just work seamlessly should the organization migrate to a different LMS. (SCORM stands for "Sharable Content Object Reusability Model.") I believe this is one of the reasons why they chose javascript for their API. Likewise, I believe (though I'm not sure) that any IMS standards related specifically to instructional content (as opposed to, say, information about the students)also assumes javascript for the API. This would probably include the Simple Sequencing spec (particularly since it is scheduled to be rolled into SCORM 1.3 shortly) but not necessarily (for example) the Enterprise spec.
By the way, I believe that Berklee has built an LMS with a SCORM-compliant data model that they are eventually planning on rolling into the dotLRN distribution.
