The latest version of the Ballerina language has been released. The "Swan Lake" version aims to make it simpler to build and deploy cloud-native applications.

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, adds what the developers say are "substantial language features and platform tools to produce programs that handle network interactions, data, and concurrency straightforwardly."

Ballerina services have been redesigned to better support data-oriented protocols, such as HTTP and GraphQL, and RPC-style protocols, such as gRPC, and services have become service objects that work uniformly with client objects.

A revised table type has been introduced along with a significantly enhanced integrated query language for iterable structures.

The Ballerina Visual Studio Code extension has also been improved, with a new "low-code editing experience" in the new VS Code plugin, making it possible to edit Ballerina programs graphically and textually.

Library modules that support RESTful-style network protocols have been improved with resource methods, and modules that support RPC-style protocols improved with remote methods.

New in this release is a feature called Code to Cloud, which the team says is designed to allow developers to write code without thinking about the deployment platform. The aim is that this will simplify the experience of developing and deploying Ballerina code in the cloud by building the containers and required artifacts by deriving the required values from the code. This initial release can generate the deployment artifacts of Docker and Kubernetes, with support for other container platforms planned for the future. Ballerina Swan Lake  is available now.

More Information

Ballerina Home Page

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