A new "Swan Lake" beta release of Ballerina has been released that the developers say radically simplifies how developers build and deploy cloud-native applications through an intuitive syntax for developing services and APIs, seamless JSON support, and built-in concurrency control.

Ballerina is an open source programming language and platform that the developers say provides cloud native middleware as a programming language. Ballerina has been developed by open-source technology provider WSO2. Rather than treating a network as an I/O source, Ballerina includes client objects, services, resource functions, and listeners as part of the language.

The new "Swan Lake" version adds a number of features designed to help when creating cloud-native applications. The improvements start with a redesign of the syntax for developing APIs and services, including procedure call (RPC) and RESTful style services and seamless support for JSON.

Ballerina also now includes client and service objects that can be configured to use multiple different protocols, using either an RPC-based interface type or a RESTful interface type such as HTTP or GraphQL.

Concurrency control has also been improved. Earlier versions of Ballerina already offered good concurrency support, but it now automatically works out when it is safe to run the concurrent components in an application parallel with the concurrency control features added in Swan Lake.

Data handling is another area to have received attention. Earlier versions of Ballerina had a query feature with a SQL-like syntax included as part of the language, and could be used to carry out type-safe and declarative transformation of JSON, XML, and tabular data. This feature has been enhanced to support ordering and joins, and the table type has been redesigned to work with other structural types. .

The final improvement of note is the ability to automatically create deployments for Kubernetes and Docker to make it easier to deploy Ballerina code to the cloud.

More Information

Ballerina Home Page

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