Ballerina is a general-purpose programming language designed by WSO2 for cloud-era application programmers. It is free and open-source software released under Apache License 2.

The project started in 2015 by architects from WSO2 as a code-based alternative to the configuration-based integration tools such as enterprise application integration (EAI), enterprise service bus (ESB), and workflow products.

It has various constructs geared toward cloud-native development including support for various data formats and protocols, reliability, distributed transactions, application programming interfaces (APIs), and event streams.

Ballerina was first publicly announced in 2017 and version 1.0 was released on September 10, 2019.

Ballerina is a general-purpose language with a familiar syntax along with a direct graphical representation of the code in the form of sequence diagrams. It has fundamental abstractions designed to make integration problems easier to program. Ballerina was designed by WSO2 to improve productivity for application developers that have to work with distributed computing. It is easy to write and modify and is suitable for application programmers.

The designers, who provided enterprise integration products for over 10 years, used their knowledge of the industry when designing the language, says WSO2 director and Ballerina founder James Clark.

The regular Hello World program:

To execute the above program, place the source code in a .bal file and provide the path of the file to the bal run command.