Ballerina - Cloud-Native Middleware as a Programming Language

1. Cloud-Native Middleware as a Programming Language
Anupama Pathirage
June 2022

2. Source : https://snarky.ca/the-key-challenges-in-designing-a-programming-language/

3. Source : IBM cloud native development report

4. In this session
Why we need a new programming language?
What is Ballerina?
Key features of Ballerina
Demo - Develop a REST service using Ballerina
Open source contributions to Ballerina

5. Application development process
● Write code to integrate many systems
● Test and document the code
● Build and package into Docker
● Write deployment descriptors
● API management and security
● Scaling and performance
● Observe the usages and analytics
● Adjust and redeploy

6. Why we need a new programming language?
○ Better network abstractions
○ Better support for data representation
○ Network aware type system
○ 1st Class support for a wide spectrum of network protocols
○ Ability to handle concurrency easily
○ Cloud friendliness
○ Visual representations for the full picture
○ Should be a complete platform, not just a language

7. What is Ballerina?
○ Started in 2016 by WSO2.
○ A general-purpose programming language.
○ Specializes in solving integration & cloud-based problems by providing the
right level of language abstractions and tools.
○ Open-source project and driven by the community.

8. What is Ballerina?
○ Data-Oriented
○ Language has objects, the development methods are not completely OOP-based.
○ Both objects and functions are first class concepts, giving developers the ability to choose
the best option based on their requirements.
○ Primary focus is on represent, describe, communicate pure data.
○ Compiled
○ Flexibly typed
○ Concurrent
○ Ballerina is NOT a JVM language. It has two implementations.
○ jBallerina - written in java to run on top of JVM. This is the first implementation to prove
the language.
○ nBallerina - Compiled using LLVM, directly to the platform architecture.

9. Ballerina Provides Network Abstractions
○ Provides abstractions for both network
services and network clients.
○ For clients - Client objects with remote
methods to represent outbound network
messages
○ For services - Service objects
○ A remote method on a service object
represents a network-callable method.
○ A resource method, which enables a
more data-oriented view of services.
○ Incoming network messages are
dispatched to service objects by using
objects implementing the
language-defined Listener type.

10. Ballerina has Network-Aware Data & Type System
● Ballerina’s type system is specifically focused
on aiding the development of networked and
distributed applications.
● Plain Data
○ Messages exchanged by network
protocols are represented by plain
data
○ This is called anydata in Ballerina
○ Can be directly serialized to and from
JSON in a simple, natural way.
● Ballerina has a structural type system
○ Type compatibility is identified by
considering the structure of the value
rather than just relying on the name of
the type.

11. Code to Cloud with Ballerina
● Ballerina provides a unique developer
experience to move from code to cloud.
● The Ballerina compiler can be extended to
read the source code and generate artifacts
to deploy your code into different clouds.
● These artifacts can be Dockerfiles, Docker
images, Kubernetes YAML files, or serverless
functions.
● Building the source with
○ bal build --cloud=k8s Generate the
Kubernetes YAML files and Docker image
○ bal build --cloud=docker
Generate the Docker image and Dockerfile

12. Ballerina is Concurrent, Reliable & Maintainable
● With more and more applications needing to
support network interaction, concurrency
becomes important for handling scale.
○ Asynchronous function calls - calls a function
asynchronously and the function runs on a
separate logical thread
○ Workers - Represents a single strand of a
function invocation.
○ A strand is a logical thread of control assigned
to every worker, which is multitasked
cooperatively instead of preemptively.
● Ballerina runtime has built-in support for
interacting with a transaction manager.
○ language provides syntax for delimiting
transactions.

13. Ballerina Provides Sequence Diagram

14. Ballerina is a Platform
Ballerina has:
- "The language" - This is the core and it's the part that's defined in the
language specification.
- "Platform" - The language has been designed in conjunction with key
components of the surrounding ecosystem
The platform includes:
● a standard library
● a centralized module repository, and the tooling needed to support that
● a documentation system (based on Markdown)
● a testing framework
● extensions/plug-ins for popular IDEs (notably Visual Studio Code).

15. All batteries included
Auth
Cache
Crypto
Log
io
time

16. Demo

17. Search for Books and Movie Data

18. Contributing to Ballerina
Ballerina has:
○ https://ballerina-platform.slack.com/
○ - - https://groups.google.com/g/ballerina-dev
○ https://github.com/ballerina-platform/

19. Thank You