Book Image

Cloud Native Applications with Ballerina

By : Dhanushka Madushan
Book Image

Cloud Native Applications with Ballerina

By: Dhanushka Madushan

Overview of this book

The Ballerina programming language was created by WSO2 for the modern needs of developers where cloud native development techniques have become ubiquitous. Ballerina simplifies how programmers develop and deploy cloud native distributed apps and microservices. Cloud Native Applications with Ballerina will guide you through Ballerina essentials, including variables, types, functions, flow control, security, and more. You'll explore networking as an in-built feature in Ballerina, which makes it a first-class language for distributed computing. With this app development book, you'll learn about different networking protocols as well as different architectural patterns that you can use to implement services on the cloud. As you advance, you'll explore multiple design patterns used in microservice architecture and use serverless in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure platforms. You will also get to grips with Docker, Kubernetes, and serverless platforms to simplify maintenance and the deployment process. Later, you'll focus on the Ballerina testing framework along with deployment tools and monitoring tools to build fully automated observable cloud applications. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to apply the Ballerina language for building scalable, resilient, secured, and easy-to-maintain cloud native Ballerina projects and applications.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Basics
4
Section 2: Building Microservices with Ballerina
8
Section 3: Moving on with Cloud Native

Understanding the Ballerina type system

The type system is the most important part of learning any programming language. The Ballerina type system lets developers define variables with different structures. Starting from basic types, a developer can build much more complicated data structures. Ballerina type systems include data types as well as behavioral types such as functions and errors. Ballerina types can be separated into five categories, as follows:

  • Simple types: These are the primitive data types of the Ballerina language, such as boolean, float, and so on. These types are immutable by nature.
  • Structured types: These are simple types organized in structures, such as arrays and maps.
  • Sequence types: This is a combination of simple and structured types.
  • Behavioral types: Rather than representing data, these types are used to handle behaviors of the Ballerina language. These types include errors, functions, objects, and so on.
  • All other types.

The...