The beautiful ballerina of WSO2

Reading time : 2 min

"A programming language that doesn't change the way you think about programming is not worth knowing"-Alan Perlis  quoting this at the very beginning ,the writers of  https://ballerina.io/ promises the developer community a useful open source language to cater the needs of the cloud era . This was introduced and is in development under WSO2 , an open source technology provider founded by Mr.Sanjiva Weerawarana and Mr.Paul Fremantle .  

Ballerina is known to be a general purpose programming language which has optimized features to support distributed nature of applications . It is mainly geared towards cloud native development . Most of the languages today have been created before the introduction of concepts such as micro services , containerization and then of course cloud deployment . Therefore , the developers of Ballerina seemed to focus more on addressing integration issues that are frequently talked about within the developer community. 

So here's my beginner level exposure to Ballerina :

1) Download ballerina from https://ballerina.io/downloads/ or can try it online on https://play.ballerina.io/    Both the options of downloading a release for your system or starting from a source are available. 

2)Then the quick installation wizard will run through the setup and install ballerina on your machine .

3)Then make a new file (eg:HelloWorld.bal) . The extension for ballerina files would be .bal and if it has been properly installed ,we can observe the icon being changed as follows in the project directory. 

4)Then let's write this simple program that would print a simple Hello World statement . 

5)Open a terminal in the project directory and give the command :
ballerina run <filename>

Then we can see our program successfully printing Hello World on the terminal  .