All I want for Xmas is Chicory INTRO In a lot of cultures, during Christmas time, Santa would distribute toys and presents to the good kids around. If you are reading Java Advent Of Code, that means that you care about Java and I’m sure you are a good one who deserves a present! Let me be your Santa today and I’ll show you a new shiny present: From the outside, the box looks small. We are not going to find any full-fledged framework to write Enterprise applications. On the front, there are pictures of mythical integrations and fancy plugin systems, but a note on the back catches the attentio ..read more

We live immersed in social networks. And we are deeply dependent on them. Because of that, your reputation has practical impact in your life and your career. That makes Reputation one of your most precious assets you have in life. Reputation is more important than your job, house and even money. And it directly affects how you get or maintain all those things. Reputation is what people believe about you. Although it is not equal to trust, your reputation has a strong relationship with how people trust you and your capabilities. Although you don’t have full control of how people see you, you no ..read more

Java 21 has introduced a groundbreaking feature called String Templates. This new feature, which is part of JEP 430, changes the way Java handles strings by combining literal text with dynamic expressions and template processors. This is perfect for situations where you need to use values that are calculated at runtime or entered by the user. String Templates revolutionize the way strings are handled in Java applications. In this article, we will take a closer look at String Templates. Delving into Template Expressions At the core of String Templates is a new syntax for Java called ‘template e ..read more

Java is an amazing language with lots of features, performance, and its ecosystem. This coming from a Java developer, intersect that with AI use cases, and suddenly, questions can be asked is Java suitable for AI/ML workloads? Truth be told, the short answer is YES! In this article, I will highlight some of the latest advancements and areas we, the Java developer community, can feel at ease doing some of the most interesting things out there. This may give us all some inspiration to bridge and strengthen this intersection further in 2024. Let’s start with the most interesting bits that have ta ..read more

Artificial Intelligence is all the craze lately. With the recent Quarkiverse extension you can can get to work with Large Language Models (LLM) using LangChain4j. I thought it would be nice to demystify and show the simplest way you can get to have an AI agent to help you understand and update your own code. What is LLM LLMs, or Large Language Models, are advanced AI systems trained on vast text data that excel in understanding and generating human language. The basics of the system is a neural network known from the 20th century which with more access to data and compute power now is really g ..read more

When a new paradigm of communication between applications appears, most developers are excited to migrate and start using it without thinking about the possible problems. Using events instead of classic communication like SOAP, REST, or GraphQL is no exception because it introduces a lot of benefits like decoupling the producers from the consumers, giving you the possibility to change flows, and increasing the performance, but not all are benefits. The theory of the use of events looks excellent without any problem. Still, when you start to work with events, many challenges appear like how to ..read more

After over 5 years of hands-on experience with Java and Spring/Spring Boot, I decided to take the plunge and go for the Spring Boot Certification. It’s one of those milestones many of us developers aim for, right? Drawing from memories of my Oracle Java Certification learning process, I was ready for a long ride where theory often seems worlds apart from practice. However, as I delved deeper, I came across aspects of Spring Boot that don’t usually make it to your everyday news and tutorials. In this article, I’m eager to share these unexpected findings. I’m happy that I’ve unraveled cool featu ..read more

As a Java developer you probably spend a lot of time writing Java source code and executing a Java compiler to convert that human readable Java source into machine readable bytecode stored in Java class files. If you’ve ever wondered how a compiler works or how a Java compiler creates Java class files, then keep reading! We’ll work through writing a compiler for a simple programming language that compiles to Java bytecode. We’ll implement a compiler for the esoteric programming language Brainf*ck, which is simple enough that it doesn’t require much code to create a working compiler. What is Br ..read more

What’s an assertion? It’s a way to test an assumption in the code normally associated with an expected result, where we will compare it to the current outcome. We all know a lot of different assertions: if it is null, equal, true and all its variations are negations: not null, not equal, false, and so on. Adding assertions in the tests is that makes the test a test! Assertion libraries for the win! The unit test libraries support different assertions but are limited in the way few variations exist. Taking JUnit 5 as an example, it has the class Assertion with 8 main assertion targets, excludin ..read more

Why AI orchestration Large Language Models (LLMs) are changing the way we develop and interact with applications and software. To back-office employees to business users to developers, natural language is the future of user interaction. This brings challenges and innovation in the way we build and code AI applications. We need modern ways to manage these AI applications. AI orchestration is the process of managing multiple AI applications and services in a coordinated way. It helps to optimize the performance, scalability, and reliability of AI solutions. AI orchestration is solving the proble ..read more