Quarkus at JNation 2025

[insectengine]

Event Description: JNation is an inclusive developer conference covering various topics relevant to the software development industry.

Date: MAY 27 & 28 - 2025
Location: Coimbra, Portugal
Event Type: In Person

https://jnation.pt/

Sessions

Session Title: Efficiency and Rock n’ Roll (Really!)
Speaker(s): Holly Cummins
Day/Time: TBD
Abstract: Is efficiency rock and roll? You might think the answer is “no, definitely not, no way.” Efficiency is about doing more with less, and rock n’ roll is all about turning it up to eleven and doing more with more. Efficiency is about being responsible, and rock n’ roll is about being irresponsible. But wait! High overheads are not rock n roll, and they’re not efficient. Spending time on boring tasks is neither rock n roll, nor efficient. We’re spending way too much time writing and running code that doesn’t spark joy. In this talk, Holly will discuss practical patterns for wringing maximum value out of our code, for minimum effort. One of the techniques is sleeping! It turns out, both people and computers should be lazier, and that’s definitely rock n roll.

Session Title: Agentic AI with Quarkus, LangChain4j and vLLM
Speaker(s): Mario Fusco
Day/Time: TBD
Abstract: Although there is no universally agreed definition of what an AI agent is, in practice several patterns are emerging that demonstrate how to coordinate and combine the capabilities of multiple AI services, in order to create AI-based systems that can accomplish more complex tasks.

These Agentic Systems architectures can be grouped in 2 main categories: workflows, where LLMs and tools are orchestrated through predefined code paths, and agents, where LLMs dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage, maintaining control over how they execute tasks.

Moreover the security and safety of Agentic Systems architectures is one of the biggest challenges for the adoption in mission critical scenarios. The possibility to serve the model on premise and the introduction of guardrailing techniques are key enablers.

The goal of this talk is giving a theoretical overview of Agentic AI in general and these patterns in particular, discussing their range of applicability and showing with practical examples how they can be easily implemented with Quarkus and its LangChain4j extension on premise using vLLM and Kubernetes.

Session Title: Java meets AI: Build LLM-Powered Apps with LangChain4j
Speaker(s): Eric Deandrea & Jan Martiska
Day/Time: To be determined...
Abstract: Join us for a guided tour through the possibilities of the LangChain4j framework! Chat with virtually any LLM provider (OpenAI, Gemini, HuggingFace, Azure, AWS, ...)? Generate AI images straight from your Java application with Dall-E and Gemini? Have LLMs return POJOs? Interact with local models on your machine? LangChain4j makes it a piece of cake! We will explain the fundamental building blocks of LLM-powered applications, show you how to chain them together into AI Services, and how to interact with your knowledge base using advanced RAG.

Then, we take a deeper dive into the Quarkus LangChain4j integration. We'll show how little code is needed when using Quarkus, how live reload makes experimenting with prompts a breeze and finally, we'll look at its native image generation capabilities, aiming to get your AI-powered app deployment-ready in no time.

By the end of this session, you will have all the technical knowledge to get your hands dirty, along with plenty of inspiration for designing the apps of the future.

Session Title: Quarkus for Spring Developers
Speaker(s): Eric Deandrea
Day/Time: To be determined...
Abstract: In this session, I will show concepts and conventions familiar to Spring developers and how those same concepts and conventions can be implemented in Quarkus, all while highlighting similarities and differences between them. Additionally, I will show similarities and differences in how testing is done, highlighting Quarkus Dev Services.

This session will be mostly live coding while minimizing the amount of slides. I will introduce an existing Spring application with a full test suite and build a Quarkus equivalent version of it, live.