[Ballerina Lesson - 1] Day one with Balerina!!!

Ballerina is a new programming language for integration in the concept of "Integration Simple". As the https://ballerina.io mentions "Ballerina is a compiled, transactional, statically and strongly typed programming language with textual and graphical syntaxes".

Before moving further, first we will explore bit on the keywords used in the above phrase.

Compiled -  This means that the source code will be converted to machine code before executing at the runtime, this will give an advantage over the interpreted code as it doesn't need to work it out on the fly as the application is running due to that it is more faster than the interpreted language. 

Statically and Strongly Typed - Here statically typed means variables need not be defined before they’re used, but explicit initialization is needed. The next part Strongly Typed means variables are necessarily bound to a particular data type. For eg: Java is also a Statically and Strongly Typed programming language.

As an initial step, we will setup the environment for the development.

Setting up Ballerina Development Environment with IntelliJ IDEA

As pre-requisites we need the following:

• IntelliJ IDEA [1]
• Ballerina IntelliJ IDEA Plugin [2]
• Ballerina SDK [3]

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/#section=windows

[2] https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9520-ballerina

[3] https://ballerina.io/downloads/ - ballerina-platform-0.970.1.zip

Follow the below screens to complete configuring the IntelliJ IDEA.

Go to File -> Settings and click on the plugins and you will get the below screen.

Then under search input "ballerina" and click on the "search in repositories" and then you will get the below results page.

Click on install and once complete you will get the below screen.

Now we can add the SDK for that follow the below screens. Go to File -> New -> Project... and select Ballerina.

Now we are done with configuring the IntelliJ IDEA. We will dive into the Ballerina development from my next blog.

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”
- Frank Herbert -