MIVA Script

Miva Script is a proprietary computer scripting language mainly used for internet applications such as e-commerce. As of 2015, it is developed, maintained and owned by Miva Merchant, Inc., based in San Diego, California.
Many web hosting companies support Miva Script on their servers, but it is significantly less widespread than other popular web languages.

History

The language was first developed under the name HTMLScript by Joe Austin and others in 1995, and a company, HTMLScript Corporation, was formed the following year.

The origins of Miva Script began in 1993 when David Haldy and Joseph Austin built the first version of HTMLScript. The first version was written in the programming language Perl, which was called Logic Enhanced HTML (LEHTML). Joseph Austin wrote a wrapper for it in the programming language C that let it start off as a root process and then downgrade itself immediately to the ownership and permissions of the owner of the script file. This wrapper made it suitable for use with his hosting service which was called Volant Turnpike at the time. Joseph Austin eventually sold Volant Turnpike to Dave Haldy. Perl allowed self-executing code, so LEHTML did not have its own expression analyzer and just parsed the expression into Perl syntax and then passed it into Perl. Volant Turnpike users liked using LEHTML, so Joseph Austin and Ron Ahern wrote an expression analyzer and re-implemented the LEHTML syntax in the C language. Joseph Austin called the end result HTMLScript and registered the name with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Joseph Austin, Troy McCasland and Derek Finley were the founders of the company called HTMLScript Corporation.

HTMLScript did not have the concept of a "WHILE" or "FOR" loop because of the low server processing power at the time. It would be enough to bring the whole server down if even one program ran away. So, Joseph Austin did not implement a loop to make it impossible for an HTMLScript server process to run away. Also, he implemented the ''macro'' in the first version of HTMLScript so it would allow self-executing code. The macro was powerful, but it eventually had some security issues.

In 1997, Jon Burchmore extensively rewrote the language to make it more syntactically consistent, although the new engine supported both old HTMLScript and new (named mivascript) syntaxes. Jon Burchmore rewrote HTMLScript with syntax that Joe developed with the help of SoftQuad, using the emerging XML standard. Jon Burchmore wrote the replacement for KoolKat which then became Miva Merchant. The new end-product supported both the old HTMLScript syntax and new (named Miva Script) syntaxes.

On October 14, 1997, HTMLScript’s name was changed to Miva Script and the company name was changed to Miva. Soon afterward, Miva Merchant followed suit for the name of the product. The name ''Miva'' comes from the Egyptian hieroglyphics for the word ''cat''. The word for cat is a combination of two symbols: milk basin followed by a quail. The milk basin is pronounced ''mee'' and the quail is pronounced ''waa'' which are combined to say cat. Joseph Austin thought this was clever, as they had called KoolKat “an electronic (cat)alog.” Joseph showed it to a German friend who could not pronounce the waa sound and instead kept on pronouncing it as ''va''. Joseph Austin registered the domain Miva.com and filed the trademark.

In 1998, the firm was renamed Miva Corporation. In 1998, the first version of Miva Merchant came out. In 2002, the Miva Script compiler was delivered, and the HTMLScript syntax and macros were dropped from the engine. Miva Corporation was sold in 2003 to a mid-cap, public company called FindWhat. Subsequently, FindWhat bought the name Miva.

In 2007, Russell Carroll and a group of investors bought the original Miva technologies and customer base from Miva and started Miva Merchant, Inc.

Language features

Miva Script is often described as ' XML-like' although this is something of a misnomer. It consists of tags which may be interspersed with HTML and XHTML and which all start with dBase