Agenda

This talk demonstrates the journey from basic LLM integration to building capable AI agents using Spring AI and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). MCP standardizes how AI models interact with external tools and resources through a structured client-server architecture.

Today's intelligent AI applications can understand context, guide decisions, and integrate seamlessly with external services. Through live coding and practical examples, I will illustrate how to implement both client and server components.

We will explore MCP's core capabilities and demonstrate how the Spring AI MCP can integrate AI into your existing Java applications. You'll learn to build server MCP features (tools, resources, prompts) and use client capabilities (sampling, elicitation).

Whether you're developing new AI-driven solutions or enhancing existing systems, this talk will equip you with the tools and strategies needed to leverage MCP effectively.

We'll explore the origins of Java, the story of Duke and the story behind the famous coffee cup logo. Discover key milestones, major releases, and pivotal innovations. Featuring entertaining Java trivia, quizzes, and interactive activities, this session is designed to keep participants engaged and learning about Java's legacy. 

We've all felt an inevitable "tedium" when writing tests, haven't we? If it's boring, if it's complicated or unnecessary? Isn't it? John thought so too, and, as much as he had heard about writing tests before production code, he had never managed to put it into practice, and even when he had tried, John had become even more frustrated at not understanding how to put it into practice outside of a few examples katas 🤷‍♂️

Listen to this story in which I will explain how John went from not understanding Test Driven Development (TDD) to being passionate about it... so much that now he doesn't want to work any other way 😅 ! He must have found some benefits in practising it, right? He says he has more advantages than working in any other way (e.g., you'll find defects earlier, you'll have a faster feedback loop or your code will be easier to refactor), but I'd better explain it to you in the session, right? Ah! And if you think everything will be theoretical, no! Get ready to see code examples with Spring Boot.

PS: Think of John as a random person, as if he was even the speaker of this talk 😉 !

We will discover how to reclaim control by using Domain-Driven Design, hexagonal architecture, and functional programming principles. 

In this session, we will go through practical strategies to keep domain logic clean, reduce coupling, and adopt functional error handling. These ensure design remains at the core of the solution, irrespective of what the framework encourages. 

Alternatively, the Java Annotation Processing API, introduced in Java 6 in 2006, allows developers to hook into the compilation phase to process sources and react to annotations present on them. This was leveraged by libraries like Lombok and Dagger, and frameworks such as Micronaut, although their way of processing annotations varies. Other frameworks like Quarkus perform the annotation processing during build time, instead of the compilation time. In this session, Micronaut Framework committer Álvaro Sánchez-Mariscal will explain with examples the different techniques that can be used for both runtime and compile-time processing of annotations, revealing the magic behind popular open-source projects.

They'll leave excited about modern Java and ready to try something new.

What I'll Cover

1. Performance Revolution: Quarkus vs Spring Boot 

2. Type Safety: jOOQ vs JPA 

3. Decision Framework: When to Use What 

4. Challenge attendees to try one new tool in the next 30 days

We will start with a simple Docker image containing a popular "one fat JAR" and look into its downsides (deployment speed, traffic volume). To address them, we will discuss the strategy of splitting the JAR into multiple layers and using multistage Dockerfiles, gradually improving our image. Join me to learn how to build the ultimate Docker image for Spring applications.