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 <Mv. There are both paired and stand-alone (empty) tags. Before version 4.14, Miva Script was interpreted by the Miva Script engine, Empresa. Version 4.00 introduced a compiler, boosting performance significantly. One of the distinguishing features of Miva Script is the native support for a variation of dBase database platform (DBF III) tables with a proprietary index format and support for SQL. Many installations today are running with MySQL database. Variables are untyped and are not pre-declared. Miva Script uses the file extensions .mv, .mvc, and .mvt which is the common file extension for runtime compiled template source files. Implementations Miva Merchant Empresa Empresa is the underlying engine for Miva Script. In versions numbered less than 4.0, Miva Merchant Empresa is a script interpreter available for web servers running *nix and Microsoft Windows