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    Mivascript usage beyond Miva Merchant

    Hello everyone,

    I'm quite new to Miva in terms of programming abilities, though I've been tinkering with it on and off for a few years in a completely non-commercial "This is fun" manner every now and then. I've always felt somewhat held back though by the frankly horrendous state of the documentation for Miva until mivascript.com came along and made it A LOT easier to get behind the code (Though it still has to be said there is still a long way to go yet before new developers can come along and pick Miva up without a struggle as there is still quite a lot missing).

    Recently a situation has cropped up that has made me sit down and look at Miva with a view to "Doing something serious" with it. By way of quick explanation, I am a soldier and we need a facility to manage the parcels and letters well wishing members of the public send to anonymous soldiers in our unit when we are posted abroad (We get a lot). Unfortunately they are generally intended for a random individual so they are posted to "A soldier on the front line" or "An anonymous soldier" or something like that which makes distributing them out fairly and working out who got what a nightmare. What I would like to do is make our welfare team an app in Miva that would allow them to index, label and assign who gets what and how many so they are equally shared.

    It's not a big ask for a Mivascript/MySQL setup and it would be a pretty trivial web app. However as I started to work on it I became very curious to know why there aren't many other websites and web apps out there built in Mivascript beyond the Merchant product.

    I love the ease and simplicity of Mivascript and I don't wish this to sound anything like a rant, but it seems that Miva Merchant is generally the start and end of Miva usage on the wider internet as a whole, which is a shame given how much easier it is to pick up and learn in comparison to PHP, etc. Of course, I could be wrong and there are many sites out there using Miva outside of the Merchant product, but I looked hard and couldn't find that many. I also appreciate that comparing Miva to PHP isn't exactly fair as they have two different focuses but Mivascript does have the ability to offer the majority of the functionality PHP does.

    I've figured there may be a few factors to why uptake of Mivascript outside of the Merchant product has not been greater and they are all linked. These are the main reasons I think why.

    The first is probably the same reason the world keeps spinning. Money. Let's face it, Mivascript is an enabler. It enables the Miva Merchant product to be built. Miva Merchant makes money. Mivascript does not. Therefore it makes no commercial sense to throw time and effort into pushing it as a product in it's own right. However therein lies another issue that has probably prevented its uptake. It's closed source nature which continues to confound me.

    I've always wondered why a company, whose income is mostly derived from a derivative product developed with a closed source scripting language that they make available for free for anyone to use would continue to invest time in developing it when they could just open source it and take that headache away, especially if they have no interest in monetizing it. If you look at every other closed source scripting language, the language itself is the product, not a web app built with the language. Open sourcing would mean they still get to use it and other people are helping with the development, upgrades and documentation leaving them to concentrate on their core product, Merchant. They could even continue making contributions to Mivascript if they wished. Open sourcing it would not present a threat to their main product Merchant. Why not? Well consider this, if I wanted to make a competing shopping cart to Merchant tomorrow, I could make one in Mivascript!

    Which brings me to it's licensing status. It's free as in beer, not free as in freedom. Should I as an individual go and develop a...let's pick anything but a web store LOL...games review site using Mivascript only to discover 6 months down the line the free beer is no more and Mivascript has suddenly become a licensed and paid for product, or worse, withdrawn, I am going to be pretty narked! I think that's a big enough reason for most people to stick to either an open source language or a paid for proprietry one, either way there is no uncertainty, your paying for it, or your not!

    Then we come to the issue I alluded to in my opening paragraph. The documentation. It has been over the years pretty abysmal until mivascript.com came along and made it somewhat better (There's still a lot missing). Even today, if you follow the links to the documentation for Mivascript on the Miva Merchant site a large part of it is massively out of date. Yet compare it to the Miva Merchant webstore documentation and the majority of that is quite good. This links back to my first point. Merchant makes money, Mivascript does not. You can see where the effort goes. Coming back to mivascript.com, as far as I can tell it is effectively a third party effort!!

    I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has any opinions on why Mivascript hasn't made more of an impact outside of the Merchant e-commerce world. And indeed if anyone else has used it for a website that is anything but an online store and did you have the same considerations?

    #2
    Re: Mivascript usage beyond Miva Merchant

    I don't know if there's an objective answer to that (as in an absolutely correct one) but I can provide a whole lot of context.

    1. In the mid to late 90's Mivascript was a very popular language well beyond Miva Merchant as it's roots are slightly older than PHP and it was free to web developers as long as they were on a Miva enabled host.

    2. In the early 2000's when we switched from being interpreted to compiled, at the time the company was not doing well financially and the original owners of the company made a decision (one that you allude to as a threat above) to switch from charging hosting companies for the engine and instead to start charging developers for the compiler. That effectively killed outside Mivascript development from a momentum standpoint and in hindsight was a really bad decision. It had no positive impact financially and certainly took the winds out of the external Mivascript sails.

    3. There is likely more Mivascript apps out there than you know, but it's definitely not a large number these days. I suspect some of the developers who maintain those will pipe in here.

    4. Why don't we Open Source it? We've certainly discussed this many times internally, and the reasons are this. Most Open Source projects fail. For every Red Hat there's dozens of Linux distro's you've never heard of and once we let the genie out of the bottle there's no good way to put her back in.

    5. Ultimately we don't ignore Mivascript on any level, in fact more active Dev has happened on the language in the last 3 years than the previous 5 or so before that and the pace is increasing not decreasing. We do focus on adding things that matter to our development roadmap for Miva Merchant as a commercial product, that is true, but in general those advances are broadly useful. Take a look at the Rel notes of the 5.06 Engine, that engine was essentially where Development stopped back in 2005 or so. Then look at what's been added between 5.07 and 5.19 which is primarily all work in the last 3 years, it's a lot of new functionality.

    I would love to find a way to more broadly deploy Mivascript, it's a nice introduction to us. We have 2 full time doc writers working on the docs, including 1 who is only on Dev docs for the language. Those just come out in Big Chunks unlike the small iterations we do on the Miva Merchant docs.

    The main incentive we have to develop those docs from a commercial stand point is that we need to train our own staff on the language, so we have to do the work anyway and it's a nice bonus. Hopefully you've seen the more recently released stuff, like the Dbase guide, etc.. (but much of that is MM specific for sure).

    In the end from where we sit right now, the risks to reward ratio for Open Sourcing the language is too high, but that could change or we might be able to find another way to alleviate the fears of dependency without actually OSing it.
    Last edited by Rick Wilson; 11-22-13, 09:45 AM.
    Thanks,

    Rick Wilson
    CEO
    Miva, Inc.
    [email protected]
    https://www.miva.com

    Comment


      #3
      Re: Mivascript usage beyond Miva Merchant

      Just another point of view...

      We are primarily Miva Merchant developers....cause that's where the money is<g>. However, as you point out Mivascript is a great tool to use in everyday applications. We use it internally for a myriad number of tasks (our internal time tracking system is written in it for example). We also use it to build things dozens of small supporting applications. (Just wrote a script to manage inventory tracking interrogator for a client's pinnacle cart to distribution center. Took about 4 hours.)

      If you haven't already seen this site, its a great place to get some more ideas on how to build things with Mivascript (though the examples are fairly old, they concepts are still valid--and the author has done some pretty big systems with Mivascript): https://www.scotsscripts.com/faqs/mv101
      Bruce Golub
      Phosphor Media - "Your Success is our Business"

      Improve Your Customer Service | Get MORE Customers | Edit CSS/Javascript/HTML Easily | Make Your Site Faster | Get Indexed by Google | Free Modules | Follow Us on Facebook
      phosphormedia.com

      Comment


        #4
        Re: Mivascript usage beyond Miva Merchant

        Hi,
        I am one of the oldest users on the block so to speak. I've been dealing with Miva Script in some fashion since 1995 or so.
        I can tell you first hand that almost anything can be done. I once even created a DoD approved (military personnel related) secure web site using Miva Merchant and Miva Script.
        Miva Script is awesome - and it would be wonderful if more people used it. The single biggest issue we have faced as a company (as compared to a single developer) is finding people who know it. As the developers like me get older and farther away from coding, there are fewer and fewer developers learning it... that indicates the direction Miva Script is going. Think morse code or punch cards - both still used but only by those that remember true floppy disks...
        William Gilligan - Orange Marmalade, Inc.
        www.OrangeMarmaladeinc.com

        Comment


          #5
          Re: Mivascript usage beyond Miva Merchant

          One thing to keep in mind, I agree with Bill that the hardest thing is finding people who know MivaScript, that's the "bad news".

          I can also say that we've been highly successful in the last 2 years at hiring programmers with no MivaScript skill and bringing them up to speed quickly for our own core development team.

          So one of our major initiatives around expanding the use of MivaScript is to externalize the training we do internally. It's very similar in concept to the Developer training we offer at www.mivamerchant.com/videos but specifically aimed at Mivascript.

          So unlike punch cards or morse code, the market need for Mivascript has not gone away, it's simply a lack of training/support materials to easily add new people to the community.
          Thanks,

          Rick Wilson
          CEO
          Miva, Inc.
          [email protected]
          https://www.miva.com

          Comment


            #6
            Re: Mivascript usage beyond Miva Merchant

            Originally posted by Rick Wilson View Post
            the market need for Mivascript has not gone away, it's simply a lack of training/support materials to easily add new people to the community.
            I absolutely agree - 100% and more. The market is there.

            It would be great if you all could get back into the college market. Thats where I first heard of HTMLScript (forerunner of Mivascript) as the new Web developer for a University. Once I saw how easy it was - everything I did centered around it. Unfortunately PHP was what really took hold.

            If you can get the younger folks interested - you can get a foothold to the future.
            William Gilligan - Orange Marmalade, Inc.
            www.OrangeMarmaladeinc.com

            Comment


              #7
              Re: Mivascript usage beyond Miva Merchant

              If you can get the younger folks interested - you can get a foothold to the future.
              I agree, do you think they'll be impressed we built the Taylor Swift site
              Thanks,

              Rick Wilson
              CEO
              Miva, Inc.
              [email protected]
              https://www.miva.com

              Comment


                #8
                Re: Mivascript usage beyond Miva Merchant

                haha - I am. But I don't think that counts.
                William Gilligan - Orange Marmalade, Inc.
                www.OrangeMarmaladeinc.com

                Comment


                  #9
                  Re: Mivascript usage beyond Miva Merchant

                  I personally look for excuses to write mivascript. I write it for my 9-5 *and* for my every-other-waking-moment job.

                  For my normal gig, I've developed a task tracker, log parsers, a drop down interface to create scripts used by other apps, and quite a few others.

                  For the rest of the time, I have a social networking website written entirely in mivascript (well, the chat was a php plugin I bought).

                  A lot of it starts off as, "let's see what I can do with this collection of commands." I now have a huge library of function calls and Proof of Concept apps. I love tinkering and making the "utility" functions.

                  While mivascript doesn't always give us the features we want (*cough*regex*cough*), it is very stable and pretty damn secure. So even if they close up shop, the engine will last for a good long while after so my website will keep on running.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Re: Mivascript usage beyond Miva Merchant

                    Originally posted by Rick Wilson View Post
                    I agree, do you think they'll be impressed we built the Taylor Swift site
                    Only some of the southern colleges...hey, where did you get the Miley smiley?
                    Last edited by Bruce - PhosphorMedia; 11-22-13, 12:35 PM.
                    Bruce Golub
                    Phosphor Media - "Your Success is our Business"

                    Improve Your Customer Service | Get MORE Customers | Edit CSS/Javascript/HTML Easily | Make Your Site Faster | Get Indexed by Google | Free Modules | Follow Us on Facebook
                    phosphormedia.com

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Re: Mivascript usage beyond Miva Merchant

                      I've been involved in MivaScript since the late 90's. Definitely before the compiler. I agree with everything said already. However, the biggest drawback, if it can be explained as that, that i encountered, is that if Merchant didn't need a specific feature or function, then it didn't get included in the language. Maybe this is along the same ideas already discussed, but to a non-merchant developer, this was a very big deal. Although i don't do any Miva Script development any more, I have spent quite a bit of time in the last few years converting Mivascript sites to PHP for several reasons, but primarily they all boiled down to features, available developers, poor documentation and the fact that PHP comes standard on any Linux host, but also that Miva requires a set of skills to get it installed that even most hosting companies do not have.

                      Also, with Miva running, ANY problems you encounter on a site will ultimately get blamed on Miva, since the host companies' support staff know nothing about it at all. Miva hosted companies excluded :)

                      I agree it's an awesome language. I haven't actively worked in Miva since 5.17, and the list of features have grown tremendously. However, of the ones i have seen added as of lately, most were those we were begging for several years ago and have been available in PHP for years already. I finally came to the conclusion that if i need to do external calls to a PHP script to accomplish something Miva cant do, I may as well do the whole thing in PHP from the start. Things as simple as using BCC in an email were terribly difficult to accomplish this way.

                      This all being said, I wish Miva the very best and hope the language still gets people interested in web development. I know I wouldn't be where I am today if I hadn't at least started in Mivascript.

                      Bill M.
                      Bill Matlock

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Re: Mivascript usage beyond Miva Merchant

                        Colon, Semi-Colon, Right Paren, Colon = Miley Smiley
                        Thanks,

                        Rick Wilson
                        CEO
                        Miva, Inc.
                        [email protected]
                        https://www.miva.com

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Re: Mivascript usage beyond Miva Merchant

                          ok, i guess we are done with the internet now...lets just put it away carefully, cover it with a rug and maybe mom and dad wont notice what we did.
                          Bruce Golub
                          Phosphor Media - "Your Success is our Business"

                          Improve Your Customer Service | Get MORE Customers | Edit CSS/Javascript/HTML Easily | Make Your Site Faster | Get Indexed by Google | Free Modules | Follow Us on Facebook
                          phosphormedia.com

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Re: Mivascript usage beyond Miva Merchant

                            Originally posted by Rick Wilson View Post
                            4. Why don't we Open Source it? We've certainly discussed this many times internally, and the reasons are this. Most Open Source projects fail. For every Red Hat there's dozens of Linux distro's you've never heard of and once we let the genie out of the bottle there's no good way to put her back in.
                            Originally posted by Rick Wilson View Post
                            In the end from where we sit right now, the risks to reward ratio for Open Sourcing the language is too high, but that could change or we might be able to find another way to alleviate the fears of dependency without actually OSing it.
                            I might be over simplifying this somewhat and there may be downsides I don't see, but what dangers does open sourcing the language represent? As far as I can tell, open sourcing it in this context would simply mean allowing the source code to be visible and allowing others to commit changes to the language. It seems to be nothing but gains. Developers get that warm fuzzy feeling that the open source license provides, some of the effort of development is shared out and you still get to commit changes that you need for the MM product? Even if no other entity apart from MM touched the project, what would MM the company lose from the efforts and contribution model it works from now? As long as MM needs Mivascript, the project would continue.

                            Comment


                              #15
                              Re: Mivascript usage beyond Miva Merchant

                              The Devil's in the details on this. For example if we OS'd the engine using a GNU license, we essentially lose all ability to reclaim our IP if we ever need to. Certainly there are other licenses and we could in theory consider doing something like Google does with Android where they only release certain parts of the code as OS and do it one version behind, while using a license that doesn't really limit their choices.

                              The problem I see with those options is I'm not sure it gets anyone more than they get today. Today as it stands we release the Engine (Virtual Machine) and Compiler without any licensing tools built into them at all, so it would be impossible for us today to decide to just "take it off the Market" or somehow try and leverage it for ransom.

                              In the end I think you end up right where Scott mentioned above, that you have the VM, we have no control over it, so even if we disappeared or began a more restrictive licensing model, you still have Empresa Version 5.19 in perpetuity.

                              So at the end of it all, it's essentially all risk (mostly unknown unknowns) for us a corporation and no real discernible upside since it's impossible to fathom that by us OS'ing it, we'd magically start taking market share from PHP or Ruby.

                              I do think perhaps some hybrid of all this would make sense if it was combined with an education push of some sort, but simply just OS'ing it with a much bigger initiative behind it, would not actually get you the end user what you're seeking.
                              Thanks,

                              Rick Wilson
                              CEO
                              Miva, Inc.
                              [email protected]
                              https://www.miva.com

                              Comment

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