For questions about the Ballerina programming language
Ballerina (sometimes referred to as "Ballerina lang" or “Ballerinalang”) is an open-source programming language for the cloud that makes it easier to use, combine, and create network services. Ballerina is designed and developed by WSO2 together with the open-source community.
Type system
Ballerina is a statically typed, concurrent programming language focusing on network interactions and structured data. It has all the general-purpose functionality expected of a modern programming language, but several distinctive aspects make it particularly suitable for its intended purpose.
Ballerina provides language constructs specifically for consuming and delivering network services. Its abstractions and syntax for concurrency and network interaction have been designed to closely correspond with sequence diagrams. This enables a bidirectional mapping for any Ballerina function between its textual representation in the syntax and its graphical representation as a sequence diagram.
Ballerina has a structural type system that is more flexible and allows for looser coupling than traditional statically typed languages. Ballerina's data types are designed to work particularly well with structured data over network interactions by providing first-class support for JSON, XML, tabular data, etc.
Ballerina platform
The Ballerina language has been designed in conjunction with the Ballerina platform, which provides comprehensive support for a module-based software development model, including versioning, dependency management, testing, documentation, building, and sharing.
Code to Cloud
Ballerina Code to Cloud is designed to allow developers to write code without thinking about the deployment platform. This dramatically simplifies the experience of developing and deploying Ballerina code in the cloud.
Ballerina compiler can read configuration files and other first-class cloud-related constructs in the source code and generate artifacts to deploy the code into different clouds. These artifacts can be Dockerfile, Docker image, Kubernetes YAML's, or serverless functions required to deploy the code into different clouds.
Library
The Ballerina language includes a lang library, which provides fundamental operations on the data types defined by the language. The Ballerina platform includes an extensive standard library, which consists of the usual low-level, general-purpose functionality and support for a wide variety of network protocols, interface standards, data formats, authentication/authorization standards, etc. It makes writing secure and resilient distributed applications significantly easier than with other languages.
