Java’s age is its AI superpower

Ryan Donovan (0:08)

Welcome to The Stack Overflow Podcast, a place to talk all things software and technology. I'm your host, Ryan Donovan, and today we have an interesting episode sponsored by the fine folks at IBM, talking about why Java is the best language for the agentic enterprise. And my guest for that today is Markus Eisele, who is a developer advocate at IBM. So welcome to the show, Markus.

Markus Eisele (0:33)

Thank you, Ryan. Pleasure to be here.

Ryan Donovan (0:35)

So before we get into the topic, let's get to know you. How did you get into software and technology?

Markus Eisele (0:40)

Oh, well, I don't know how much time we actually have. But yeah. TLDR, TLDR. Okay. I pretty much started like everybody else out of university. I started with my first software development consulting engagements for a German-based ISV. Stuck around for many, many years.

Ended up solving some very, very large problems in like enterprise Java technologies, architectures for some pretty large customers. And the one thing that actually stuck throughout my whole career is my idea of how people learn. So I want to share what I've learned, right? And I started very early giving internal presentations. And at some point, I basically deviated into what's now called developer advocacy, outbound product marketing, whatever you like stamp on it, but the intrinsic desire to share knowledge. So now I'm O'Reilly author, been credited as a Java champion. So like all of this basically came because I, I wanted to share knowledge. So, and I still do development as of today. I contribute to open source to like Quarkus, Longchain4j, wherever I get my hands on. And I find something that with my limited experiences as a software developer lately, I can fix, I definitely still fix it.

Ryan Donovan (2:04)

You do have some experience in Java.

That was one of the first languages that I learned in school. I understand your position is that it's awesome for agentic engineering, but why?

Markus Eisele (2:16)

Oh, that's pretty simple. It's mainly two buckets. The first bucket is all about training data.

Java has been around forever. I can't believe, but we'll end up having Java 26 enhance very soonish. When I started with Java, it was more around 1.2, 1.3 kind of releases, so very early releases.

That basically means all of Java has been in the open source, OpenJDK since forever, right? So in every single model, you'll find the basics of Java. And on top, it has been and still is, as of today, the premier language for enterprise problems, like solving enterprise problems, not making them, obviously. So the idea that we'll find training data examples, like even from your side, all over in these large language models, that is the one bucket. And the other bucket, it is a very strict language.

It is pretty typesafe. It has well-known structures that are very well-versed in terms of language constructs. And that basically means they are ideal not only to read and consume during training phases, but also to generate. And that makes it so much easier for AI agents, AI-driven tools to use Java. And I mean, modern Java is not exactly comparable with old-day Java. It made light years, light steps ahead, and it's really almost a complete rewrite, in many cases, while still being mostly backward-compatible. But having said that, that gives us the opportunity to just use agents with a high confidence on these code bases.

Ryan Donovan (4:08)

Would it be fair to say that the Java is a language with a lot of guardrails built into it?

Markus Eisele (4:14)

Absolutely. And not only the language, we can easily expand this into the platform.

I've said enterprise, right? And that always has kind of like a smell to it. It's old, it's boring. It's, you know what? It's rock solid. It is something that has been proven to work through fires, storms, thunders, like that thing, whatever it is, that still is in production based on a JVM that has been tested, built. It can be operated by teams that feel comfortable doing this. It can be scaled, right? So there is not only the language piece, it's also the platform and the tooling that we build around all of this.

In particular, the frameworks on top, right? Think about Spring, think about Quarkos. They are almost adding an enterprise level of abstraction on top of the Shia standards platform, right? And that makes it just ideal.

Ryan Donovan (5:19)

Yeah, I think the, you know, you talk about it having a long, long history, and I also started on Java 1 in school. Does any of that history get in the way of, you know, good agentic engineering? Is it ever producing like, you know, old paradigms, old code?