Show HN: Ballerina – Cloud Native Programming Language

by TylerJewell • 8 years ago

40 14 8 years ago

TekMol2• 8 years ago

As a language nerd, I had to take a look. But I really can't figure out what this is about.

"Ballerina makes it easy to create resilient services that integrate and orchestrate transactions across distributed endpoints."

Is it real or a joke? It sounds like a markov chain generator was fed with tech mumbo jumbo and then generated this?

If it's real - what is the no nonsense description?

And who is behind it?

sanjiva2• 8 years ago

I'm the lead designer of Ballerina.

Its a real language :-). Please check the spec out here: https://ballerina.io/res/Ballerina-Language-Specification-WD....

Feedback welcome!

TekMol2• 8 years ago

Thanks!

sanjiva2• 8 years ago

Oh and I didn't answer the question of who's behind it - this is being lead by WSO2, of which I'm the chief architect.

fiatjaf4• 8 years ago

No, you're just trying to be a jerk. It's difficult to explain what a service does in a single sentence, but this one makes perfect sense, albeit generical.

TylerJewell4• 8 years ago

Ballerina is a compiled, type safe, and concurrent programming language to make it easy to write integration services, which are typically the glue between connecting different endpoints with distributed transactions, reliable messaging, mediation, transformation, and orchestration.

These are all capabilities that are usually built into integration products around a language, though these concepts are baked into the syntax and the language design.

The platform portion contains additional runtimes components for enabling this functionality including an API gateway, a message broker, a transaction coordinator, and a bridge for brokering transactions to services that are written in other languages.

There are roughly 100 committers. It's a lot of people that were involved in Apache Synapse and WSO2 ESB.

gigatexal• 8 years ago

This looks really interesting. Is it production ready? What companies, if any, are using this in production?

TylerJewell4• 8 years ago

We are using it in production at WSO2 now - we have gateways and web site APIs running it.

We just made a 0.970.0 release last week which contains significant alterations. The language and runtime have been in iterative design and test for a couple years.

We are just now putting live ballerina.io so that we can start working within the community to gain adoption. A number of WSO2 customers are working with it in development and pre-production, but we asked them to not consider production deployments until the rework was done.

We hope to hit a 1.0 milestone by the end of the year where we will guarantee backwards compatibility.

We do find the runtime to be extremely stable with throughput numbers about 5x higher than equivalent ESBs, and we are running long term stability tests that are doing well. We'll publish all of these results soon, too.

fiatjaf4• 8 years ago

I want a "programming language" (or better, a platform) that would natively integrate different services, like Google Drive, Dropbox, Slack, Trello, GitHub, Dropbox and so on like they were all in the same machine.

ycrnet• 8 years ago

You are in luck, ballerina is a platform carefully designed to address most of the integration problems we face. You can have a look at ballerina central where connectors are available which are needed to integrate with third party apps like, Git twitter etc. https://central.ballerina.io/. Also take a look at some guides available at https://ballerina.io/learn/by-guide/

fiatjaf4• 8 years ago

Whoa, I wasn't expecting for that. I'll surely check it out.

Show HN: Ballerina – Cloud Native Programming Language

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