A Quick Introduction to Ballerina: The Network-Aware Programming Language

Have you heard of a programming language called Ballerina? As someone who works closely with the Ballerina language design and implementation team, I wanted to shed some light on this relatively young language that has a strong focus on network integration.

Why Ballerina, you ask? It was developed with the intent of making network behaviour a first-class concept within the language, simplifying tasks such as integrating with other services (i.e., HTTP, gRPC, GraphQL, Kafka, etc.), manipulating data, handling network security, and much more.

Here's a "Hello World" service example:

import ballerina/http;

service / on new http:Listener(9090) {

    resource function get hello(string? name) returns json {
        // name is an optional query parameter
        string target = name == () ? "World" : name;
        string message = string `Hello, ${target}!`;
        return {"message": message};
    }

    resource function get greet/[string name]() returns xml {
        // name is a required path parameter
        xml response = xml `<message>Greetings, ${name}!</message>`;
        return response;
    }
}

This service presents two HTTP resources (/hello and /greet/{name}), which produce a response in JSON and XML respectively.

You can check out more detailed examples of Ballerina's use cases in network integration.

Although the Ballerina community is currently small and largely composed of enterprise users, it's growing and openly welcoming to anyone interested in network applications development and integration. You are warmly invited to join us on discord

If you're interested in diving deeper into Ballerina, I've written a blog post covering the basics. We also have more examples for you to explore.

Let me know what you think. I'm excited to hear your thoughts and answer any questions you might have!