Quarkus at IBM TechXchange 2025

[insectengine]

Event Description: IBM TechXchange is the ultimate learning hub for developers and technologists looking to grow their skills

Date: October 6-9, 2025
Location: Orlando, Florida
Event Type: In Person

https://www.ibm.com/community/techxchange/

Tuesday Sessions

Session: Accelerate your Application Development with Automation and Gen AI
Speaker(s): Shane O'Rourke & Marc Haberkorn
Date/Time: Tuesday, Oct 9 From 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM EDT
Activity Type: Technology Breakout
Abstract: In this roadmap and strategy session, hear how IBM and Red Hat are empowering your business and development teams to break down barriers to innovation. We’ll cover JSphere Suite for Java, a next-generation set of products, built on the rich history of WebSphere, that enable rapid modernization and development through automation supported by gen AI. Learn about ways to maintain what you can, modernize what you must, and build what your clients need.

Session: Boost Developer Productivity and Speed Up Your Inner Loop with Quarkus
Speaker(s): Daniel Oh
Date/Time: Tuesday, Oct 7 - From 11:00 AM - 11:20 AM EDT
Activity Type: Tech Talk
Abstract: In today’s fast-paced development world, slow builds and sluggish feedback loops can cripple productivity—but Quarkus flips the script. Designed for Kubernetes-native Java, it turbocharges the inner loop with live coding, near-instant startup times, and memory efficiency, letting developers iterate faster than ever. Imagine tweaking code and seeing changes immediately without manual redeploys, or testing cloud-native apps locally without resource bloat. This talk includes a live demo showcasing Quarkus’ live coding in action: watch as code edits reflect in real time, feedback loops shrink to seconds, and cloud integrations streamline workflows—proving how Quarkus turns waiting time into productive coding time.

Session: Demo: Come see a live demonstration of Building Agentic AI Applications in Java with Quarkus
Speaker(s): Don Bourne
Date/Time: Tuesday, Oct 7 - From 12:30 PM - 1:00 PM EDT
Activity Type: Demo
Abstract: Come see our expert, Don Bourne (STSM - Application Runtimes AI & Technology Incubation Architect) demonstrate Building Agentic AI Applications in Java with Quarkus. Don is delivering two hands-on labs on Agentic AI; Lab 2640 - Create your own AI infused Java apps with Quarkus and LangChain4j, and Lab 2641 - Think Agentic AI is only for Python? Think Again. Java's in the game.

Session: Demo: Come see a live demo on how to boost developer productivity with Quarkus
Speaker(s): Daniel Oh
Date/Time: Tuesday, Oct 7 - From 2:00 PM - 2:30 PM EDT
Activity Type: Demo
Abstract: Curious about Quarkus? Come visit Daniel Oh for live demonstration of Quarkus with practical use cases and concrete examples, in action.

Session: Create your own AI infused Java apps with Quarkus and LangChain4j
Speaker(s): Don Bourne & Daniel Oh
Date/Time: Tuesday, Oct 7 - From 4:15 PM - 5:45 PM EDT
Activity Type: Instructor-led Lab
Abstract: Generative AI has gained significant attention over the past year, and many executive leaders are pushing Java developers to integrate AI into their applications. Does this mean we have to abandon what we've built and become data scientists? Not at all. Thanks to new projects that simplify the process, we can incorporate AI models developed by experts into our applications without major disruptions. Quarkus provides an excellent developer experience, and LangChain4j offers strong AI integration capabilities, so getting started with AI is more straightforward than it might seem. This hands-on lab will cover a range of AI features. We’ll begin with the Quarkus DevUI, where you can experiment with AI models before writing any code. Then, we’ll dive into coding and explore LangChain4j capabilities, including prompting, chaining, state management, agents, function calling, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for integrating external knowledge. We’ll also examine how to run and train models locally using tools like Ollama and Podman AI Lab. Additionally, we’ll discuss observability, fault tolerance, and compiling AI-integrated applications into native binaries. Time permitting, we might even try generating images or audio. This lab is an opportunity to learn how to build AI-enhanced Java applications directly from Quarkus experts and engineers working on LangChain4j extensions. Attendees can also share feedback with the maintainers of these projects and engage with the community.

Session: Cloud Native Java apps : Quarkus vs Springboot - The benefits like Performance, Financial and Infrastructure health
Speaker(s): Gabriel dos Santos Pereira
Date/Time: Tuesday, Oct 7 - From 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM EDT
Activity Type: Technology Breakout
Abstract: In this session Bradesco will demonstrate the options for Java application modernization, from Spring boot to Quarkus (comparison), improving performance using less CPU and memory, with better Performance, Financial and Infrastructure health. And others : from WAS to Liberty modernizing legacy apps, designed to guide development and infrastructure teams and IT leaders through the essential steps of modernizing legacy Java applications. Participants will explore the best practices for transforming monolithic architectures into modular, scalable, performant and containerized applications to run in hybrid cloud.

Wednesday Sessions

Session: Quarkus on OpenShift Hands-On Lab
Speaker(s): Ryan Jarvinen, Elder Moraes, & Alex Soto
Date/Time: Wednesday, Oct 8 From 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM EDT
Activity Type: Instructor-led Lab
Abstract: This Hands-on workshop introduce Java devs to Quarkus using OpenShift, guiding them through modern cloud-native development practices, app deployment, and migration from Spring.

Session: USAA Innovative Approach to Align Platform Strategies with Business Goals
Speaker(s): Stephen Grace & Casey Cruise
Date/Time: Wednesday, Oct 8 From 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM EDT
Activity Type: Technology Breakout
Abstract: An overview of a structured approach for USAA’s application platform team to assess and evolve application runtime technologies for its internal development community. The session will highlight key dimensions of the runtime maturity model across technology trends, processes, and tooling – offering a data driven approach to prioritizing roadmap items and to support any architectural and product decisions. It provides a progressive improvement path for aligning platform strategies with business goals to drive innovation and efficiencies.

Session: Roadmap: Business Automation in the Hybrid Cloud with IBM Business Automation Manager Open Edition
Speaker(s): Damla Orucu & Tiago Bento
Date/Time: Wednesday, Oct 8 From 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT
Activity Type: Technology Breakout
Abstract: Join us for an in-depth look at how IBM Business Automation Manager Open Editions empowers organizations to automate and manage business workflows, decisions, and rules across Hybrid Cloud environments with Red Hat OpenShift or Kubernetes. Built on a foundation of powerful open-source technologies—including Quarkus, Spring Boot, Apache KIE, Kogito, Drools, and jBPM—it gives developers, architects, and business analysts full control over collaboration, development and testing workflows, deployment strategies, integration with external services and industry-standard monitoring tools. Unlike traditional business automation solutions, IBM Business Automation Manager Open Editions is designed for flexibility. By exposing your business workflows, decisions, and rules through REST and GraphQL APIs, or by integrating with messaging systems like Apache Kafka, it adapts to your architecture—rather than the other way around. Discover how a modern, cloud-native, open-source approach to business automation can unlock agility and innovation, while fitting into your existing ecosystem exactly the way you need it to. This session features a client, Garanti BBVA. Their use case is an automation platform that allows them to perform end-to-end process automation, and orchestrate different automation technologies, banking APIs, modules, and operations center applications “as a service” with the hyper-automation principle. Garanti BBVA built this platform entirely on BM Business Automation Manager Open Editions tool (BAMoE).

Session: Think Agentic AI is only for Python? Think again. Java’s in the game
Speaker(s): Don Bourne, Alasdair Nottingham, and Daniel Oh
Date/Time: Wednesday, Oct 8 From 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM EDT
Activity Type: Instructor-led Lab
Abstract: Are you ready to revolutionize your Java application with the latest AI trend? Let's dive into the world of AI Agents and discover how they can unleash new capabilities! We'll start by showing you how to create and deploy AI Agents in a snap, and put them to work on various tasks. But that's not all - we'll also give them the tools and resources they need to make autonomous decisions and deliver quality results. But, beware: a single agent can quickly become a bloated superhero with too many responsibilities, leading to slower performance, higher costs, and mediocre results. To avoid this, we'll introduce you to the power of multiple, specialized agents that can team up and work together in harmony using Agentic workflow patterns. By the end of this journey, you'll have created a cutting-edge, enterprise-ready Java application that's powered by versatile AI Agents. Are you ready to unleash their potential?

Thursday Sessions

Session: Empowering Humanity: How AI is Shaping a Brighter Future, in Java
Speaker(s): Richard Fichtner & Shane O'Rourke
Date/Time: Thursday, Oct 9 From 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM EDT
Activity Type: Technology Breakout
Abstract: Yes, it is possible to build a high-performance, enterprise-grade AI app in record time, with Java. We will now give an introduction to Quarkus and LangChain4J , showcasing how its capabilities empower developers to create sophisticated GenAI solutions. We will explore a real-life use case with XDev, who delivered a digital reading assessment platform for the Bavarian Ministry of Education that helped German teachers analyze text complexity, recommend personalized reading materials, and provide real-time feedback to boost student comprehension.

Session: Services Reloaded: Increased Throughput with Project Loom Virtual Threads
Speaker(s): Kito Mann
Date/Time: Thursday, Oct 9 From 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM EDT
Activity Type: Technology Breakout
Abstract: The promise of Reactive programming models is that you can free yourself from the constraints of handling one request for each thread and realize increased throughput as a result. The only problem is that it requires a completely different set of APIs that many developers find counter-intuitive. What if you can achieve the same performance using thread-per-request APIs, and let the Java virtual machine handle the hard work of blocking when appropriate, and executing platform threads when the time is right? Enter virtual threads, a key feature of Project Loom, currently available in JDK 19. In this session, we'll look at how different frameworks, such as Helidon and Quarkus, are using this powerful new feature to increase throughput without requiring reactive programming models.