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.