Open Source Probe: Ballerina is born!

What is ballerina?
What is ballerinalang?

Ballerina - a new open source programming language that lets you 'draw' code to life!

It is a programming language that lets you create integrations with diagrams.

At WSO2, we’ve created a language where diagrams can be directly turned into code. Developers can click and drag the pieces of a diagram together to describe the workings of a program. Cool! isn't it?

We’re not just targeting efficiency, but also a radical new productivity enhancement for any company. By simplifying the entire process, we’re looking at reducing the amount of work that goes into the making of a program. It’s where we believe the world is headed.

As mentioned by Chanaka [4], there is a gap in the integration space where programmers and architects speaks in different languages and sometimes this resulted in huge losses of time and money. Integration has lot to do with diagrams. Top level people always prefer diagrams than code but programmers do the other way around. We thought of filling this gap with a more modernized programming language.

Ballerina features both textual and graphical syntaxes that uniquely offer the exact same expressive capability and are fully reversible. The textual syntax follows the C/Java heritage while also adopting some aspects from Go. The graphical syntax of Ballerina follows a sequence diagram metaphor. There are no weird syntax exceptions, and everything is derived from a few key language concepts. Additionally, Ballerina follows Java and Go to provide a platform-independent programming model that abstracts programmers from machine-specific details.

We are happy to announce the “Flexible, Powerful, Beautiful” programming language “Ballerina”. Here are the main features of the language in a short list [4].

Textual, Visual and Swagger representation of your code.
Parallel programming made easier with workers and fork-join.
XML, JSON and DataTable as built in data types for easier data handling.
Packaging and module system to write, share, distribute code in elegant fashion.
Composer (editor) makes it easier to write programs in a more visual manner.
Built in debugger and test framework (testerina) makes it easier to develop and test.

Ballerina supports high-performance implementations—including the micro-services and micro-integrations increasingly driving digital products—with low latency, low memory and fast start-up. Notably, common integration capabilities are baked into the Ballerina language. These include deep alignment with HTTP, REST, and Swagger; connectors for both web APIs and non-HTTP APIs; and native support for JSON, XML, data tables, and mapping.

Tryout ballerina and let us know your thoughts on medium, twitter, facebook, slack, google and many other channels.

Ask a question in stackoverflow.

Have fun!