Ballerina is a standalone open source project and does not tie anyone to any WSO2 ecosystem.
Please compare processing JSON in Java vs. Ballerina, typing network data in Java vs. Ballerina, writing HTTP/GraphQL/WebSocket/gRPC etc. services etc. in Java vs. Ballerina, calling network services in Java vs. Ballerina and then you'll see the difference between whatever your favorite Java framework (or rather combination of them) vs. Ballerina.
(I'm the founder & CEO of WSO2 and one of the lead language designers.)
edX has been my go-to recommendation for people in my side of the world (I live in Sri Lanka) to get quality education at no cost. This is the end of that - they might have some protections but its no longer going to be focused on quality content delivered in a highly learnable manner.
About 20 years ago, when I was living in Yorktown Heights NY (in Westchester county - a pretty high end county just north of NYC), we had to call 911 once because my then wife slipped on the ice and fell when she returned from work late night.
I called and said what had happened and within a short time we had police, ambulance and a fire person show up (I guess they were all bored).
IMO that's part of the problem in US policing: The assumption is that the people are bad (in my case that I had hit my wife I guess - I was interviewed by the cops before she was taken to hospital for a checkup). I called 911 for a medical emergency, not a criminal issue so why do cops have to come and treat me like a criminal. If you think that something is wrong then you find a way to find something wrong.
Ballerina has had a major revamp since the 2019 release and we recently released the first of a series of betas before making it GA. Some of the key features of the language include:
- data orientation
- flexible typing (including service typing) with major improvements in the type system
- text and graphical syntax symmetry
- cloud native features with support for easy production and consumption of services
- convenient concurrency model similar to coroutines and a lot of concurrency safety introduced with readonly and isolated types
And this is a temporary reality - once the system starts operating at full steam again the costs will come down.
Moving production is much more complex and requires long term policies and strategies- something most countries (other than China) seem unable to muster.