The document introduces Ballerina, a modern, cloud-native programming language designed for API creation and management, treating network concepts as first-class entities. It includes features like built-in taint analysis, API gateway support, and comprehensive tooling for integration with technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes. Ballerina also supports various data formats and provides a robust syntactical structure for concurrent programming.

1. Cloud Native Middleware as a Programming Language
September 2019
Lakmal Warusawithana, Senior Director - Developer Relations, WSO2
@lakwarus

4. (Almost)
Every programmer is
using and/or creating
APIs

5. Existing languages treat the
network as simply I/O
Ballerina treats APIs, listeners,
endpoints, network types as first
class entities

6. Ballerina is a modern, compiled, type safe,
concurrent programming language
Open Source implementations,
Apache Licensed
Open Specification,
Creative Commons Licensed

7. Hello World

9. Annotations

10. caller hello
POST (name)
Hello, name!

12. caller hello
POST (status)
response
twitter
tweet (status)
response

13. ○ Built in taint analysis
○ Built in API Gateway (JWT and OAuth)
○ Research on embedding SPIFFE into the language
○ First-class integration with Istio / Envoy
More info here:
https://github.com/prabath/ballerina-security

14. Based on sequence diagrams

18. ○ A type defined by union of two or more other types
float | string v1 = "John";
float | string v2 = 457.68;
float | string
0.51
1.01
457.68
-11.0
“John”
“name”
“”
“bal”
// The return type of 'post' is a union of 'http:Response' and 'error'
http:Response | error response = orderEP -> post("/create", reqPayload)

20. json is just a union - () | int | float | string | map<json> | json[]
// JSON object
json payload = { "orderdata": { "id": 1, "name": "XYZ", "price": 2500 } };
//Access object values
json orderid = payload.orderdata.id;
//JSON arrays
json orders = {
"orderdata": [
{ "id": 1, "name": "XYZ", "price": 2500 },
{ "id": 2, "name": "ABC", "price": 3000 }
]
};

21. // Simple XML literal
xml x1 = xml`<name>Lakmal Warusawithana</name>`;
// XML with namespaces
xmlns "http://wso2.com" as ns0;
xml x2 = xml `<name id="123" status="married">
<ns0:fname>Lakmal</ns0:fname>
<ns0:lname>Warusawithana</ns0:lname>
</name>`;
// XML literal with interpolation
string lastName = "Warusawithana";
xml x3 = xml`<lname>${lastName}</lname>`;
// Concat XML values
xml x4 = x1 + x2 + x3;

22. Cloud native

24. Concurrency

26. future<int> f = start add( 2,2);
if (f.isDone()) {
int result = wait f;
io:println(result);
}
else if (f.isCancelled())
{
io:println("cancelled");
}
else
{
io:print("cancelling: ");
io:println(f.cancel());
}

27. Batteries included

29. ○ Test
○ Documentation
○ Swagger tooling
○ gRPC tooling
○ Secret encryption
○ Docker / Kubernetes integration
○ Istio integration

31. Serverless

34. Observability

38. Continuous Integration

40. gRPC and ProtoBuf

41. Ballerina syntax
Automatically creates this .proto

42. https://ballerina.io/learn/by-example/

43. https://github.com/ballerina-platform/ballerina-spec

44. ○ Come to https://ballerina.io
○ Join the slack channel and/or ballerina-dev mailing list
○ Create a module and upload into Ballerina Central
○ Create issues
○ On the spec or implementation
○ If you have compiler skills, submit PRs on nBallerina or jBallerina

45. Homepage https://ballerina.io/
Downloads https://ballerina.io/downloads/
Ballerina By Example https://ballerina.io/learn/by-example/
Github https://github.com/ballerina-platform/ballerina-lang