Issue #9 - December 19, 2022

This is a recurring newsletter of content around Ballerina and related technology topics such as integration, microservices, distributed systems, and cloud computing.
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Ballerina: A Year in Review

2022 has been an exciting year for Ballerina and we couldn't have made it a great one without the support from YOU - our community!

Here’s a snapshot of how the year unfolded.

Our GA Release

At the beginning of the year, we released Ballerina 2201.0.0 (Swan Lake), adding a new set of substantial language features and tooling capabilities to produce programs that handle network interactions, data, and concurrency seamlessly.

The latest update, Ballerina 2201.3.0 (Swan Lake Update 3), was the third for the year, bringing with it a revamped series of features and significant improvements to the compiler, runtime, standard library, and developer tooling areas.

The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings

In the June 2022 edition of RedMonk’s Programming Language Rankings, Ballerina moved up to #87, with a special mention from RedMonk.

“...we at RedMonk are not running into many emergent programming languages with rare exceptions like Ballerina – five years old and ranked 87th.”

RedMonk’s Rankings are based on a combination of factors, including the number of GitHub repositories and Stack Overflow questions that mention a particular language. The rankings are intended to provide insight into the current state of the programming language ecosystem and the relative popularity of different languages. We’re proud to be mentioned by RedMonk and are looking forward to making greater strides in the future.

Ballerina Coding Challenge

Ballerina’s first global hackathon was well-received, bringing together over 1,500 developers from 90 countries. The coding challenge gave contestants an opportunity to comprehensively use Ballerina to solve problems and discover better ways to optimize network services. The winners walked away with over $10,000 in prizes!

New Discord server

To deliver a better experience for its growing community, we moved from Slack to Discord in October. The server has since grown to over 1,300 members who use this space to ask questions, share use cases, or connect with other like-minded developers.

Updates to Ballerina Tooling

Here’s a look at the key features of Ballerina’s revised tooling that we made to improve the developer experience:

• Transform Data Structures With the Visual Data Mapper
  The Visual Data Mapper is a graphical editor, that allows you to create complex data transformations easily and in minutes.
• Integrated GraphQL Tryit
  This lets you test GraphQL services using the Ballerina Visual Studio Code extension.
• Visualize Service Interactions With Project Design View (Experimental)
  Users can now visualize service interactions in a project, which is a collection of Ballerina packages. This also includes a view to see record-type compositions and relationships.

Featured articles this quarter

GraphQL Subscriptions with Ballerina: A Step-By-Step Guide

Although GraphQL is relatively new in the industry, it has grown significantly in the past few years, as it continues to address important issues in APIs. This blog by WSO2 Intern, Nuvindu Dias provides a helpful starting point for GraphQL subscriptions with Ballerina.

Serialization and Deserialization with Ballerina SerDes Module

In this cloud-centric era, most applications written in modern languages provide support for rich data structures to ensure efficient memory usage. However, not all raw data structures can be transferred over the network. This is where serialization and deserialization come into play. WSO2 Software Engineer, Mohamed Sabthar takes us through the concept with the Ballerina SerDes module.

Introduction to Ballerina Semantic Versioning Validator

This blog by WSO2 Associate Technical Lead, Nipuna Ranasinghe introduces the new Ballerina semantic versioning validator tool. It highlights how it makes a developer's life easier by detecting potential versioning problems during development.

Building an Azure Functions Project with Ballerina

Ballerina has long since included support for Azure Functions. Ballerina released the latest version of the Azure Functions package, which uses service-type concepts. In this article, WSO2 Senior Software Engineer, Anjana Supun shows how to easily build and deploy Azure Functions with Ballerina.

Featured Tweets

In this edition, we are spotlighting @dunithd, @Vordimous, and @derrick_nnaji for showing us how they use Ballerina. Thanks again for your support!

Join the Community

Join our community and get to know the latest news about Ballerina by joining our Discord server and following us on Twitter. Mention @ballerinalang with the hashtag #ballerinalang when you tweet about us and have a chance of being featured in our newsletter! Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. You can also show us your support by starring Ballerina’s GitHub repo and following us.

Thanks again for your support and your continued trust in us. We look forward to seeing you again in 2023. Until then, happy holidays from the Ballerina team!