My first experience with Ballerina

Ballerina Day Colombo 2018 (August 11th)

Hi guys, this is a small story to share my first experience with Ballerina at the Ballerina Day Colombo 2018 which was held on 11th of August at Galleface Hotel, Colombo.

The event was organized by WSO2 and I’m really really glad to say that it was a great opportunity to participate in the event. As I was familiar only with Java, I had no idea about what was Ballerina or what its capable of. But boom!! the sessions were very interesting and they made ballerina very friendly.

So let me tell you about Ballerina. Father of Ballerina is Mr.Sanjiva Weerawarna. Ballerina is an open-source, cloud-native programming language. Simply IT’S NOT JAVA ;), it’s a combination of several programming languages. But when considering with other programming languages, there are several advantages of Ballerina such as Digital transformation, Minimalization of computing (Lightweight, serverless, no need a special environment to run), Give a new comprehensive way to solve problems… etc. The most special feature of Ballerina is, it generates a sequence diagram aided graphical integration flow builder, which convert the design integration into a Ballerina code. Also, it doesn’t have Null point exceptions. Pretty cool!!!

Now its time to talk about the event ;)

The event was consist of several sessions. Even though Ballerina was a strange language, the sessions teched us many parts of ballerina very simply from the very basics to complex subjects.

The sessions were ballerina language basics, ballerina writing services, resilience and security in ballerina, ballerina tools and process streaming. After these sessions we the hacking was begun. We were given some project ideas to develop applications using ballerina. This made us more familiar with ballerina. Here is a simple Hello World code in ballerina.

import ballerina/io;

function main(string... args) {

    io:println("Hello, World!");

}

So as the end, I am happy to participate in this event as an undergraduate and I learned many new things. I have to tell others also that don’t miss any of such events because they are very valuable to our undergraduate lives and try to learn more new techniques and tools so it would be a great opportunity to you someday. Thank you. Cheers!!!