In today’s cloud-era, we need technologies that can model distributed systems in a more developer-friendly way. This means that for a single use case we need to model a flow that shows how multiple actors interact with each other, how concurrent execution flows, and what remote endpoints are involved. Sequence diagrams are known to be the best way to visually describe this.
That’s why it is the foundation for designing the syntax and semantics of the Ballerina language. Ballerina provides the flexibility of a general-purpose language while having features to model solutions based on higher-level abstractions.
In Ballerina, there is a bidirectional mapping between the textual representation of code in Ballerina syntax and the visual representation as a sequence diagram.
In Ballerina services, the entry point is the service resource function. The actor who invokes the service resource is shown as the “caller”. The “Default” participant is the resource function itself, showing the operations in its lifeline. From the resource function, further function calls are shown in its lifeline and their internal operations are expanded and merged to the same sequence diagram to show their operations as well.
The Ballerina IDE plugin (for example, the VSCode plugin) can generate a sequence diagram dynamically from the source code. To start generating a sequence diagram from your Ballerina code, download the VSCode plugin and launch the graphical editor.
