What happened at WSO2Con USA ’18 day 3?

By Vinay Babu Yella

After day 2, the third and final day was there. Or more precisely morning, as the conference stopped right after lunch. But, there was BallerinaCon as well which lasted the full day. The Yenlo-team split up between the partner meeting track (as premier certified partner we of course needed to be there :-) ), working group track and BallerinaCon, which was being held in the same venue. In this blog, we will tell you a bit about what happened at BallerinaCon.

Kick off BallerinaCon

After a ballet performance of San Francisco Ballet, Tyler Jewell, CEO of WSO2, kicked off BallerinaCon and launched a production version of Ballerina. It is important to realize this is not version 1.0 yet, it is still minor version of 0.980). By yearend of 2018 we can expect version 1.0 of Ballerina, but we expect minor changes rather than big new developments. The whole day of BallerinaCon was aimed at giving you both a high level overview and deep-dives into specific elements of the language.

Why a new language?

Paul Fremantle, CTO of WSO2, gave an introduction to the language and shed light on why we need new programming language and how current languages/integration products are not suited for the disaggregated IT landscape of enterprises. Current programming languages are not integration simple as developers take responsibility for the hard problems of integration with runtimes not suited to sequence parallelization. Also, integration products (ESBs, EAI, BPM, and DSLs) are not agile, they require XML and configuration disrupting the iterative developer flow: edit, build, run, and test. We need a new programming language that can bridge this integration gap.

Ballerina is a cloud native programming language for creating micro-services, it’s agile and suited for concurrent worker execution. Ballerina was developed from scratch and has, according to WSO2 the best of several languages like Java and Go to name but a few.

Paul went on to give a live demo of Ballerina with a HelloWorld program, dockerization of simple Ballerina flow, Twitter integration and CI/CD flow all in about 15 mins of live coding. You can see this demonstration online, this is a link to a webinar that was actually given before BallerinaCon but the demonstration is the same.

The importance of Sequence Diagrams

Sanjiva Weerawarana, Founder, Chairman, and Chief Architect of WSO2, leads the design, architecture, and development of Ballerina. He made an interesting point that we use Sequence diagrams to think about and explain important IT services, but we never had a way to code as sequence diagrams. Ballerina is developed based on the concept of providing developers to think and develop on lines of Sequence diagrams.

We can setup the structure of a program with the graphical mode of design that Ballerina supports and do detailed work in the source code view, pretty much like we create our mediation sequences in the current Enterprise Integrator.

We already see Ballerina and Ballerina based products like the MicroGateway for API Manager 2.2.0 and 2.5.0 being available and the coming months we can expect more products that work with Ballerina . Ballerina, together with a bigger change to containers (Docker / Kubernetes), serverless computing and of course microservices will change the way we will setup and run our IT systems and landscapes.

Learning more about Ballerina

The remaining sessions focused on concepts of Ballerina and service development in Ballerina. Luckily, you can catch some of the sessions online. If you want to learn more about Ballerina, here are some links:

• Our yenlo blog where we have written about Ballerina
• The Ballerina homepage
• The source code of ballerina on github

We are also working on (new) training material for Ballerina and products that use ballerina like the API Manager.

See you in November?

I hope you liked our blogs about the WSO2Con and BallerinaCon. We’re looking forward to the WSO2Con in Londen this November where Ballerina will be one of the topics as well. Do you want to learn more about WSO2 products or Ballerina? Join one of our trainings!

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