Eric is a Java Champion and Senior Principal Developer Advocate at Red Hat. Eric has over 25 years of experience designing and building Java-based solutions and developer training programs in the financial services and insurance industries. He is also a contributor to various Open Source projects, including Quarkus, Spring, LangChain4J, WireMock, and Microcks, as well as a speaker at many public events and user groups around the world.
Eric recently put his Quarkus and Spring knowledge to use by publishing his first book, “Quarkus for Spring Developers.” Outside of work, Eric enjoys boating on the lakes of New Hampshire, ice hockey, and martial arts, in which he holds a black belt in Kempo Karate.
Generative AI has taken the world by storm over the last year, and it seems like every executive leader out there is telling us “regular” Java application developers to “add AI” to our applications. Does that mean we need to drop everything we’ve built and become data scientists instead now?
Fortunately, we can infuse AI models built by actual AI experts into our applications in a fairly straightforward way, thanks to some new projects out there. We promise it’s not as complicated as you might think! Thanks to the ease of use and superb developer experience of Quarkus and the nice AI integration capabilities that the LangChain4j libraries offer, it becomes trivial to start working with AI and make your stakeholders happy 🙂
In this lab, you’ll explore a variety of AI capabilities. We’ll start from the Quarkus DevUI where you can try out AI models even before writing any code. Then we’ll get our hands dirty with writing some code and exploring LangChain4j features such as prompting, chaining, and preserving state; agents and function-calling; enriching your AI model’s knowledge with your own documents using retrieval augmented generation (RAG); and discovering ways to run (and train) models locally using tools like Ollama and/or Podman AI Lab. In addition, you’ll add observability and fault tolerance to the AI integration and compile the app to a native binary. You might even try new features, such as generating images or audio!
Come to this session to learn how to build AI-infused applications in Java from the actual Quarkus experts and engineers working on the Quarkus LangChain4j extensions. This is also an opportunity to provide feedback to the maintainers of these projects and contribute back to the community.
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