Ballerina

Ballerina is an open-source programming language developed specifically to address the challenges of integration in cloud-native environments. Unlike traditional drag-and-drop tools or general-purpose languages, Ballerina is designed from the ground up for integrating network services, providing developers with language-level support for these tasks.

The language includes a rich ecosystem of network protocols, data formats, and connectors, enabling seamless communication and data exchange between systems. Ballerina offers both textual and graphical representations of source code, allowing programs to be viewed and edited as sequence diagrams and flowcharts. This dual approach supports developers who prefer visual programming as well as those who work with traditional code. Built-in concurrency features are managed through sequence diagrams and language-managed threads, aiming to simplify concurrent programming without the complexity of asynchronous functions. Explicit error handling, static typing, and concurrency safety are emphasized to promote reliability and maintainability in software projects.

Ballerina is optimized for cloud-native development, with network primitives embedded in the language to simplify the creation and deployment of services in cloud environments. It supports structural types with openness, which are used for static typing and for describing service interfaces. The language also provides type-safe, declarative processing of formats such as JSON, XML, and tabular data, with language-integrated queries for data manipulation.

The project has been developed by WSO2 since 2016 and was first released in February 2022. Ballerina is available as open-source software, making it accessible for developers seeking to build, combine, and manage network services and integrations in modern, distributed systems.