Devoxx Belgium 2024: AI Integration and Java Ecosystem Advancements

Top Takeaways From Devoxx Belgium 2024

Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Join For Free In October 2024, I visited Devoxx Belgium and again it was an awesome event! I learned a lot and received quite some information which I do not want to withhold from you. In this blog, you can find my takeaways from Devoxx Belgium 2024! Devoxx Belgium is the largest Java conference in Europe. This year, it was already the 21st edition. As always, Devoxx is being held in the fantastic theatres of Kinepolis Antwerp. Each year, there is a rush on the tickets. Tickets are released in several batches, so if you did not have a ticket during the first batch, you will get another chance. The first two days of Devoxx are Deep Dive days where you can enjoy more in-depth talks (about 2-3 hours) and hands-on workshops. Days three up and including five are the Conference Days where talks are being held in a time frame of about 50 minutes. You receive a lot of information! This edition was a special one for me because I got the opportunity to speak at Devoxx myself, which has been an awesome experience! Enough for the introduction: the next paragraphs contain my takeaways from Devoxx. This only scratches the surface of a topic, but it should be enough in order to make you curious to dive a bit deeper into the topic yourself. Talks from Victor Rentea are always attended massively. This talk was during the Deep Dive days (fewer attendees), so I was able to attend it (only the first part; have to watch the second part online). However, it was an interesting talk, confirming some best practices I already apply, like using mutation testing, AssertJ, and so on. Definitely worth watching. by Wouter Bauweraerts The most interesting part of this talk to me was about the Testing Trophy. We all know the testing pyramid: many unit tests; on top of that, fewer integration tests; and on the top, end-to-end tests. There are many variations upon that, but this is basically the idea. However, with unit tests, a lot of mocks are used and mocks are often tightly coupled to the implementation. So, whenever you want to refactor, you also need to change a lot of unit tests. In order not to break functionality, you will rely on your integration tests. Your integration tests also cover a large part of the unit tests. So, why not invest more in integration tests and write unit tests for these situations which are hard to test with integration tests (error cases for example)? by Cédrick Lunven, Guillaume Laforge After visiting Devoxx Belgium in 2023, I got more and more interested in AI because the door was opened for using AI within the Java ecosystem. An interesting topic within this regard is Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). I also call it "chat with documents." This Deep Dive session covers every part of RAG and explains which options you can choose from and which problems you might encounter. Some takeaways: by Christian Tzolov Spring AI is the answer to LangChain4j within the Spring ecosystem. This talk shows how it can be applied. As far as I can see, LangChain4j offers more functionality at the moment. But it is interesting to see how this will evolve. It is good to have more options available within the ecosystem. LLM-AggreFact is an interesting website where models are compared and evaluated. by Nico Martin Running an LLM in your browser... Seems like a weird idea, right? This talk shows you how. I could not yet get the projects working on my machine but do watch this talk. Up till now, LLM inference engines were not available in Java. However, two new Java projects have been introduced: Jlama and Llama3.java. No Python included. Exciting times lay in front of us! by Gunter Rotsaert I do need to mention my own talk. I demonstrate how you can use an AI coding assistant using the DevoxxGenie plugin within the IntelliJ IDE. The interesting part is that you do not need to use a cloud provider. The assistant also works using a local LLM. I have also written a post about this topic. by Bouke Nijhuis This talk shows you which problems you encounter when you need to support multiple versions of an API endpoint. The speaker has written an open-source library for this purpose. I am wondering how this can be applied when you use an API-first approach; e.g., you first create your OpenAPI specification and use a code generator to generate some code for it. It's something to investigate later, so I might write a blog about this one. by Johan Hutting A few weeks ago, some posts appeared on X about this topic. This is an interesting talk if you are wondering what you need to do when open-sourcing a library. So, when will we be able to use this new functionality? This is yet uncertain. First, Maven 4 features need to be completed, then the code needs to be refactored, and after that, performance issues need to be solved. There is still quite some work to do. However, it is advised to check whether your projects build with Maven 4. If you encounter issues, you can raise a ticket for that. Devoxx 2024 was great and I am glad I was able to attend the event. As you can read in this blog, I learned a lot and I need to take a closer look at many topics. At least I do not need to search for inspiration for future blogs!

Top Takeaways From Devoxx Belgium 2024 - DZone

In October 2024, I visited Devoxx Belgium and again it was an awesome event! I learned a lot and received quite some information which I do not want to withhold from you. In this blog, you can find my takeaways from Devoxx Belgium 2024! Devoxx Belgium is the largest Java conference in Europe. This year, it was already the 21st edition. As always, Devoxx is being held in the fantastic theatres of Kinepolis Antwerp. Each year, there is a rush on the tickets. Tickets are released in several batches, so if you did not have a ticket during the first batch, you will get another chance. The first two days of Devoxx are Deep Dive days where you can enjoy more in-depth talks (about 2-3 hours) and hands-on workshops. Days three up and including five are the Conference Days where talks are being held in a time frame of about 50 minutes. You receive a lot of information! This edition was a special one for me because I got the opportunity to speak at Devoxx myself, which has been an awesome experience! Enough for the introduction: the next paragraphs contain my takeaways from Devoxx. This only scratches the surface of a topic, but it should be enough in order to make you curious to dive a bit deeper into the topic yourself. Talks from Victor Rentea are always attended massively. This talk was during the Deep Dive days (fewer attendees), so I was able to attend it (only the first part; have to watch the second part online). However, it was an interesting talk, confirming some best practices I already apply, like using mutation testing, AssertJ, and so on. Definitely worth watching. by Wouter Bauweraerts The most interesting part of this talk to me was about the Testing Trophy. We all know the testing pyramid: many unit tests; on top of that, fewer integration tests; and on the top, end-to-end tests. There are many variations upon that, but this is basically the idea. However, with unit tests, a lot of mocks are used and mocks are often tightly coupled to the implementation. So, whenever you want to refactor, you also need to change a lot of unit tests. In order not to break functionality, you will rely on your integration tests. Your integration tests also cover a large part of the unit tests. So, why not invest more in integration tests and write unit tests for these situations which are hard to test with integration tests (error cases for example)? by Cédrick Lunven, Guillaume Laforge After visiting Devoxx Belgium in 2023, I got more and more interested in AI because the door was opened for using AI within the Java ecosystem. An interesting topic within this regard is Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). I also call it "chat with documents." This Deep Dive session covers every part of RAG and explains which options you can choose from and which problems you might encounter. Some takeaways: by Christian Tzolov Spring AI is the answer to LangChain4j within the Spring ecosystem. This talk shows how it can be applied. As far as I can see, LangChain4j offers more functionality at the moment. But it is interesting to see how this will evolve. It is good to have more options available within the ecosystem. LLM-AggreFact is an interesting website where models are compared and evaluated. by Nico Martin Running an LLM in your browser... Seems like a weird idea, right? This talk shows you how. I could not yet get the projects working on my machine but do watch this talk. Up till now, LLM inference engines were not available in Java. However, two new Java projects have been introduced: Jlama and Llama3.java. No Python included. Exciting times lay in front of us! by Gunter Rotsaert I do need to mention my own talk. I demonstrate how you can use an AI coding assistant using the DevoxxGenie plugin within the IntelliJ IDE. The interesting part is that you do not need to use a cloud provider. The assistant also works using a local LLM. I have also written a post about this topic. by Bouke Nijhuis This talk shows you which problems you encounter when you need to support multiple versions of an API endpoint. The speaker has written an open-source library for this purpose. I am wondering how this can be applied when you use an API-first approach; e.g., you first create your OpenAPI specification and use a code generator to generate some code for it. It's something to investigate later, so I might write a blog about this one. by Johan Hutting A few weeks ago, some posts appeared on X about this topic. This is an interesting talk if you are wondering what you need to do when open-sourcing a library. So, when will we be able to use this new functionality? This is yet uncertain. First, Maven 4 features need to be completed, then the code needs to be refactored, and after that, performance issues need to be solved. There is still quite some work to do. However, it is advised to check whether your projects build with Maven 4. If you encounter issues, you can raise a ticket for that. Devoxx 2024 was great and I am glad I was able to attend the event. As you can read in this blog, I learned a lot and I need to take a closer look at many topics. At least I do not need to search for inspiration for future blogs!