| Ballerina Swan Lake Beta 2 Released |
| Written by Alex Denham |
| Tuesday, 28 September 2021 |
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The second beta of the new "Swan Lake" version of programming language Ballerina has been released. Swan Lake is designed to simplify how developers build and deploy cloud-native applications and this release introduces new language features together with improvements and bug fixes to the compiler, runtime, standard library, and developer tooling after its initial beta. Ballerina is an open source programming language and platform that is described as data oriented rather than object oriented. The developers say it 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 updated version of Ballerina, Swan Lake, is nearing feature complete in this beta. Improvements in Swan Lake include a redesign of the syntax for developing APIs and services, such as procedure call (RPC) and RESTful style services and seamless support for JSON. New features in beta 2 include a reworked log package that adds observability span context values to log messages, and an improved io package that gives users more control over which stream they print to. The websocket and websub packages have also been enhanced. Elsewhere, the developers have worked on the database package to better handle remote queries, and the HTTP package to update the log support. Developer updates start with the debugger, which now handles the client remote method calls better. The Bindgen tool has also been modified to generate module-level mappings. Finally, the test framework now has added support for a map of tuples as the data set for data provider functions, and now supports based filtering when running tests against data sets. Ballerina Swan Lake beta 2 is available now. |
