Ballerina has the following three foundational building blocks:
- Runtime
- Deployment
- Life cycle
Let us take a look at each point in detail:
- Ballerina runtime environment: The complete definition of runtime is described on the right-hand side of the following screenshot:
This screenshot can be found at the following website: http://ballerina.io.
- Ballerina deployment: We can deploy Ballerina code directly from your developer Command Prompt, and this option supports DevOps and easy CI/CD. The following screenshot shows the platforms on which you can deploy the Ballerina service:
- Life cycle: Ballerina has multiple tools, including source code compilation for test-case generation and helps build various different deployment platforms. We can write the Ballerina source code with the .bal extension in most famous IDEs such as Visual Studio, VIM, PyCharm, and IDEA, and then we can use the ballerina build command to compile the source code into byte code with the .balx extension. After that, we use ballerina run<binary_name>.balx to execute our code. The following diagram shows the life cycle of our source code through the CI/CD process:
