Ballerina is a general purpose, concurrent, and strongly typed programming language with both textual and graphical syntaxes. It is designed to make it easier to write programs that integrate with data sources, services, and network-connected APIs of all kinds. It is optimized primarily for such programs - while it can be use to program anything, it is not recommended to use Ballerina if a significant portion of the program is not related to integrating with data sources, services, or network-connected APIs.

Ballerina has been inspired by Java, Go, and other languages, but it has a concurrency model built around a sequence diagram metaphor.

You can download the Ballerina distribution, try samples, and read the documentation at http://ballerinalang.org.

1. Maven
2. Node (v8.9.x or latest LTS release) + npm (v5.6.0 or later)
3. Docker

1. Clone this repository using the following command.

   git clone --recursive https://github.com/ballerinalang/ballerina

   If you download the sources, you need to update the git submodules using the following command.

   git submodule update --init 

2. Run the Maven command mvn clean install from the ballerina root directory.

3. Extract the Ballerina distribution created at distribution/zip/ballerina/target/ballerina-<version>-SNAPSHOT.zip.

The website http://ballerinalang.org has several samples you can try out right there in the page. These samples are also available in the <ballerina_home>/samples directory in your Ballerina distribution. Or go to the ballerina-by-example website to view the Ballerina examples.