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?
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?
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