Ballerina, developed by WSO2, is a statically typed, open-source programming language tailored specifically for cloud-native environments. Designed with modern distributed systems in mind, Ballerina integrates networking and internet data structures directly into its core. This approach streamlines the development of microservices, making it easier to build and manage APIs while offering an experience familiar to developers who work with languages like C, C++, C#, and Java.
One of Ballerina’s key strengths is its built-in support for common data formats like JSON, XML, and SQL-like language queries, which facilitates handling structured data. The language also offers concurrency management with tools like sequence diagrams and language-managed threads, providing a more visual and controlled approach to parallel processing. In addition, Ballerina supports flexible types for use both in programming and in service interfaces, allowing developers to work with different data models easily. Error handling and concurrency safety are also core features, ensuring that services are resilient and performant in distributed cloud environments.
Ballerina has two primary implementations: the currently available jBallerina and the in-progress nBallerina. jBallerina is implemented in Java, compiles to Java bytecode, and runs on the Java virtual machine (JVM), making it interoperable with Java applications. This version can generate GraalVM native images, allowing for more efficient execution in cloud-native scenarios. It also supports containerization tools like Docker and Kubernetes, enabling easy deployment in cloud infrastructures. On the other hand, nBallerina, still under development, will compile to native binaries using LLVM, offering a C foreign function interface for even lower-level performance optimizations.
Ballerina provides a wide range of database interfaces, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and others, making it suitable for building cloud applications that need robust database integrations. As a cloud-native language, it simplifies the entire process of writing, testing, and deploying distributed services, helping developers bridge the gap between application logic and infrastructure management.