release-notes-0.970.0-beta1.md

Overview to Ballerina 0.970.0-beta1

This release has improvements to the main function argument passing model where the user will not have to wrestle with string array to access command line parameters.

function main (string... args) {
    io:println("Hello, World!");
}

Auto completion support is added in language server / IDE for match statements to help unions to be matched and tuples have to be destructured.

This release also introduces the message broker. Ballerina Message Broker is a lightweight, easy-to-use, message-brokering server. It uses AMQP 0-9-1 as the messaging protocol. This release embeds the message broker into the Ballerina platform distribution.

Enhancements to manage configurations and anonymous endpoints for Kubernetes and Docker has been introduced in this release. The new configuration management model enables you to define what to be copied into the container from within your program.

@kubernetes:Deployment {
    copyFiles:[
        {
            target:"/home/ballerina/data/data.txt",
            source:"./data/data.txt"
        }
    ]
}

The command line syntax for passing runtime configuration using toml file looks like the following

% ballerina run --config something.toml foo.bal[x] [program args]

You can now do this using code from within your program itself.

@kubernetes:ConfigMap {
    ballerinaConf:"./conf/ballerina.conf"
}

You can also pass any configurations in addition to runtime configurations using the following syntax in this release.

@kubernetes:ConfigMap {
    configMaps:[
        {
            mountPath:"/home/ballerina/data",
            data:["./conf/data.txt"]
        }
    ]
}

The container can be configured with anonymous endpoints using the following syntax

@docker:Config {}
service<http:Service> helloWorld bind {} {
    sayHello(endpoint outboundEP, http:Request request) {
        // your service code here
    }
}

The above code will automatically bind post 9090 inside the container for helloWorld service.

Apart from these enhancements, this release ships many stabilization enhancements on top of the previous release, which was 0.970.0-beta0.

Compatibility and Support

There are no compatibility and support changes from 0.970.0-beta0 other than the syntax change of main (string... args)

Improvements

Language & Runtime

• Main method argument parameters has been changed as main (string... args)

IDEs & Language Server

• “match” expression completion support in Language server

Ballerina Message Broker

• Include message broker inside Ballerina platform distribution and should be able to start the broker from the bin

Ballerina Extensions

• Added copy file support to Kubernetes and Docker images
• Added first class support for BallerinaConf and remove name, mount path request from the user
• Add anonymous endpoint support for Kubernetes and Docker

Getting Started

You can download the Ballerina distributions, try samples, and read the documentation at https://ballerina.io. You can also visit Quick Tour to get started. We encourage you to report issues, improvements, and suggestions at Ballerina Github Repository.