First, let me say that unless you want to create Miva Merchant modules you never need to know Miva Script or even really know what Miva Script is. If you’re a store owner and you want to customize the look and feel of your store, you’re better off reading about HTML and StoreMorph. But if you just want all the facts or want to get into programming modules, here you go!
Miva Script is a programming language that runs on your web server to create web pages. Miva Merchant itself is written in Miva Script, and all Miva Merchant modules are written in Miva Script. It’s a lot like a combination of PHP and ColdFusion server side programming.
Modern Miva Script is a “compiled” language, much like Java. The code is compiled into “bytecode” that is interpreted and run by the Miva Virtual Machine named Empresa that runs on your web server. The Miva Script compiler and virtual machine are available for most common platforms such as Win32 IIS, Apache, and other Unix like operating systems that run CGI applications. Miva Mia is a desktop web server that most Miva Script programmers use to debug their code prior to running it on a live server.
Miva Script has been described as an XML-like language for web programming, and it mixes HTML and functions in the same document. It was originally called Htmlscript, and was available circa 1995 when just about the only alternative to writing web applications was either Perl or C. Both can be complex and difficult to understand, so Htmlscript was developed as a “simple” way to make web pages dynamic. It survives today largely due to Miva Merchant, though there are a few other commercial applications that have been written in Miva Script. Miva Script is a proprietary “closed source” language (you can’t get the source code to the compiler or virtual machine”), though all of the features and functions of the language are documented by Miva. Additionally, there are published APIs to Miva Script that allow c/c++ developers to extend the language in any way they need for their custom applications.
