Ballerina (programming Language)

Ballerina is an open source general-purpose programming language designed by WSO2 for cloud-era application programmers.

The project started in 2015 by architects from WSO2 as a code-based alternative to the configuration-based integration tools such as EAI, ESB, and workflow products.

It has various constructs geared toward cloud-native development including support for various data formats and protocols, reliability, distributed transactions, APIs, and event streams.

History

Ballerina was first publicly announced in 2017 and version 1.0 was released on September 10, 2019.

Design

Ballerina is a general-purpose language with a familiar syntax along with a direct graphical representation of the code in the form of sequence diagrams. It has fundamental abstractions designed to make integration problems easier to program. Ballerina was designed by WSO2 to improve productivity for application developers that have to work with distributed computing. It is easy to write and modify and is suitable for application programmers.

The designers, who provided enterprise integration products for over 10 years, used their knowledge of the industry when designing the language, says WSO2 director and Ballerina founder James Clark.

Some key concepts in Ballerina include:

* The network in the language - Ballerina introduces fundamental, new abstractions of client objects, services, resource functions, and listeners to bring networking into the language.
* Sequence diagrams for programming - In Ballerina, every program has a corresponding event diagram showing the processes involved and the sequence of messages exchanged between them.
* Structural, open-by-default typing - Ballerina has a statically typed, structural type system that aims to be network data schema friendly.
* Moving from code to cloud - Ballerina brings the entire program execution process to the hands of the developer with extensible metadata that gets compiled to runnable programs for all major cloud platforms.
* Automated observability - Ballerina incorporates features into the language itself that helps keep track of metrics, logs and tracing.

Examples

Hello World

The regular Hello World program:

import ballerina/io;

public function main()

To execute the above program, place the source code in a .bal file and provide the path of the file to the bal run command.

$ ballerina run hello_world.bal
Hello World!

The service version of the Hello World program:

import ballerina/http;

service /greet on new http:Listener(9090)

Services are executed in the same manner, except they don't terminate like regular programs do. Once the service is up and running, one can use an HTTP client to invoke the service. For example, the above service can be invoked using the following cURL command:

$ curl http://localhost:9090/greet
Hello World!

REST API

import ballerina/http;

service on new http:Listener(9090)

$ curl http://localhost:9090/factorial -d 5
120

GraphQL API

import ballerina/graphql;

service /stocks on new graphql:Listener(4000)

type StockQuote record ;

$ curl -H "Content-type: application/json" -d '' 'http://localhost:4000/stocks'

Sequence Diagram

The generated sequence diagram is a canonical representation of the source code. The two representations can be used interchangeably. The diagram support is provided through the Ballerina VS Code plugin. The following are a couple of such generated sequence diagrams, compared with its associated code.

A sample program for retrieving and processing COVID-19 data:

A sample program for creating a report out of pull request data retrieved from GitHub:

JSON Support

The language provides support for working with JSON values. The builtin type `json` is defined as the following union: (), boolean, int, float, decimal, string, json[], map

import ballerina/io;

public function main() returns error

Code to Cloud

Docker and Kubernetes artifacts required for deploying the code to the cloud can be generated when building the code. Values required for these artifacts are derived from the code. Additionally, one can override these values as well using the Cloud.toml file. To enable generation of the cloud artifacts, the users can use the cloud build option in the Ballerina.toml file. Use docker to generate just the Docker image and the Dockerfile and use k8s to generate Kubernetes artifacts as well. Minimal sample config TOML files would look something like the following:

Ballerina.toml file:

ackagedistribution = "2201.0.0"

uild-optionscloud="k8s"

Cloud.toml file:

ontainer.imagerepository="bal_user"
name="greet"
tag="v0.1.0"

Workers

import ballerina/http;
import ballerina/lang.'int;
import ballerina/io;

// Workers interact with each other by sending and receiving messages.
// Ballerina validates every worker interaction (send and receive)
// to avoid deadlocks.
public function main()

function calculate(string expr) returns int, error

References

Further reading

* Fernando, Anjana, Warusawithana, Lakmal (2020)
Beginning Ballerina Programming
', Apress (part of Springer Nature)

External links

* https://ballerina.io
* https://github.com/ballerina-platform/ballerina-lang GitHub repository.
{{Programming languages

2017 software
Programming languages created in 2017
Scripting languages
Dynamically typed programming languages
Statically typed programming languages
Concurrent programming languages
High-level programming languages
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Cross-platform free software