Hello, I'm Ballerina.

Ballerina is a new programming language for integration built on a sequence diagram metaphor. Ballerina is:

• Simple
• Intuitive
• Visual
• Powerful
• Lightweight
• Cloud Native
• Container Native
• Fun

The conceptual model of Ballerina is that of a sequence diagram. Each participant in the integration gets its own lifeline and Ballerina defines a complete syntax and semantics for how the sequence diagram works and execute the desired integration.

Ballerina is not designed to be a general purpose language. Instead you should use Ballerina if you need to integrate a collection of network connected systems such as HTTP endpoints, Web APIs, JMS services, and databases. The result of the integration can either be just that - the integration that runs once or repeatedly on a schedule, or a reusable HTTP service that others can run.

Getting started

You can download the Ballerina distribution, try samples, and read the documentation at http://ballerinalang.org.

Building from the source

If you want to build Ballerina from the source code:

1. Get a clone or download the source from this repository (https://github.com/ballerinalang/ballerina).
2. Run the Maven command mvn clean install from the root directory.
3. Extract the Ballerina distribution created at ballerina/modules/distribution/target/ballerina-0.8.0-SNAPSHOT.zip to your local directory.

Running samples

The website http://ballerinalang.org has several samples you can try out right there in the page. Or go to the Samples in Github to view all the Ballerina samples. These samples are also available in the <ballerina_home>/samples directory in your Ballerina distribution.