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JCON @ IBM TechXchange 2025
2025, October 06 – 09
⟟ Orlando, FL | Orange County Convention Center
Act now! Limited time discount 30% off
Note: You need to have an IBM Account to register for the event. The Account creation is free but an extra step.
About The Conference
JCON @ IBM TechXchange 2025: Embrace your Java Journey.
Dive into the vibrant pulse of the Java community at JCON @ IBM TechXchange 2025 — the dedicated Java track within IBM’s global developer conference in Orlando, Florida. Brought to you by the Java User Group Oberpfalz in collaboration with JAVAPRO Magazine, this in-person experience brings Java enthusiasts and enterprise developers together from around the world.
IBM TechXchange 2025 is where builders meet. All under one roof, digging into the same stack from different angles. No fluff. No filler. Just real people, real tools and real problems — solved together.
The next phase of your AI journey starts here. Get direct answers to your toughest technical questions with access to 1,000+ experts and real-time guidance from community leaders — all in one event.
What's in it for you?
Community
✓ Learn from the Best in the Java Community
Engage directly with Java Champions and expert speakers who lead innovation in the Java ecosystem.
✓ Grow Your Network, Grow Your Impact
Connect with passionate developers, contributors, and community leaders to exchange ideas, collaborate on open projects, and build lasting professional relationships.
Code
✓ From Developers for Developers
Led by practitioners. Focused on what matters to you.
✓ Live coding and hands-on workshops
Experience live coding with AI tools and hands-on workshops led by experts.
✓ Contribute to open source projects
Collaborate with third-party open source communities to drive innovation.
Content
✓ Topics Relevant to Your Daily Work
Learn from the people behind the technology you use every day.
✓ Explore cutting-edge developer tooling
Preview the latest developer tools and experiment with quantum computing.
✓ Earn certifications and network
Validate your skills with on-site certifications and expand your professional network.
Featured Sessions
langchain4j-cdi: Infuse your Jakarta and MicroProfile applications with all the AI
Generative AI burst on to the public scene in November 2022, over ten years after Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning premiered on Coursera. Java developers have long felt like second class citizens, compared to the cool Python kids. LangChain4J changes the game. Java is cool with AI now! This lecture from 30-year industry veteran Ed Burns explores why it took so long for Java developers to have access to easy-to-use AI libraries, compared to Python developers.
This session introduces the new langchain4j-cdi repository within the LangChain4j GitHub organization. Combine the power of Jakarta EE with the reach of LangChain4j. All the idioms you know and love from Jakarta now work with all the AI exposed by LangChain4j: injection, validation, persistence, REST and more!

Edward Burns
Principal Architect for Java on Azure
To Java 25 and Beyond!
Java 25 is the next version with LTS support, and with it comes many exciting changes. In this presentation we will do a rapid review of some of the key changes to the JDK from 11-21 and how they have improved developer experience, performance, and supporting Java applications in production. We will then transition to what Java looks like in a post JDK 21 environment, and where Java will be heading to in JDK 25 and beyond!
If you want to learn about the current state of Java and were its heading, this is the presentation for you.

Billy Korando
Java Developer Advocate
5 Ways to Speed up your Maven Build
This presentation covers five strategies to help speed up Maven builds, focusing on practical steps like parallelizing builds, optimizing Maven profiles, and leveraging caching. We'll explore how tweaking your configuration can significantly reduce build times. The aim is to provide actionable techniques that developers can immediately apply to make their Maven builds faster—directly impacting productivity by shortening the feedback loop for code compilation and testing wait times.

Brian Demers
Java Champion & Gradle Developer Advocate
Effective Kubernetes for Java/Jakarta EE and MicroProfile Developers
There are several key techniques to understand while using Kubernetes with Java/Jakarta EE and MicroProfile applications. Examples include:
* How Kubernetes primitives (such as deployments and services) align with application server administration, clustering, and load-balancing.
* How to add self-healing capabilities using Kubernetes probes and monitoring with open standards like OpenTelemetry for logging/metrics/tracing.
* How Kubernetes can be extended using Operators to effectively manage clusters.
* How the CI/CD pipeline of your application can be adapted to Kubernetes.
This entirely slide-free, demo-driven session walks through each of these considerations in turn. At the end of the session, you will have all the demos on GitHub so you can explore them on your own.

Reza Rahman
Principal Program Manager, Java on Azure at Microsoft
The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java
Over the last 30 years, Java has been the preferred technology for developing enterprise applications. Frameworks and approaches such as J2EE, Spring Framework, Java EE, Spring Boot, and Jakarta EE all contribute to this success story.
The Jakarta EE 11, with features for increasing performance and developer productivity, such as support for virtual threads and the new Jakarta Data specification.
This session will give you a history lesson of Enterprise Java as well as an overview of everything brought to you by Jakarta EE 11 with lots of code demos. We will also look forward and check out what's in the pipeline for Jakarta EE 12.

Ivar Grimstad
Jakarta EE Developer Advocate
How an Open Source Auto-refactoring Engine Powers Large-scale Fintech Software Migrations
Maintaining a consistent and adaptable technology stack is more challenging than ever. How do you ensure your architecture evolves with business needs, security requirements, and emerging best practices?
This session explores how OpenRewrite, an open-source auto-refactoring tool, powers large-scale software migrations in fintech and beyond. We’ll demonstrate how OpenRewrite recipes are designed to analyze entire codebases, address security vulnerabilities, enforce architectural standards, and seamlessly migrate frameworks and libraries. We’ll also show how these deterministic recipes can be used ‘tools’ in an agentic AI implementation.
Join us to learn how OpenRewrite enables dynamic architecture governance, empowering teams to secure, modernize, and streamline their codebases at scale.

Jonathan Schneider
Co-founder @ Moderne
Full-stack web apps, 100% Java
Full-stack development can be intimidating. You need to know several technologies, and you need to know them well. But what if you could build a full-stack web app using only Java? No JavaScript, no HTML, no CSS. Just Java.
Join this live coding session to discover how to develop a full-stack web app using Spring Boot and the open-source Vaadin Flow framework. Starting from scratch, we'll cover everything: persistence, external services, and a good-looking UI. All in Java.

Marcus Hellberg
VP of AI Research at Vaadin
Seven Habits of Highly Effective AI Java Coding
🤖 AI code assistants are everywhere in Java development! They promise speed, but be honest, blindly accepting suggestions or falling into "vibe coding" often leads to confusing code and technical debt. 🤔
✨ This talk reveals the 7 key habits and critical mindset shifts that separate frustrating AI interactions from game-changing results.
The Golden Rule? Simple: whether you wrote the line or the AI did, you own the code. (git blame doesn't point to 'code assistant'❗) That's habit #1 – come to the talk to discover the other 6!
Knowing these habits with solid checks and a clear view of code quality are non-negotiable.
Join this session to learn the habits that will transform how you build Java code with AI. Walk away ready to make these tools work for you, faster and safer! ✅🚀

Jonathan Vila
Developer Advocate at Sonar
High-Performance Caching with Java: Supercharge Your Sluggy Database Application
Struggling with sluggish databases and Hibernate bottlenecks in your Java applications? Frustrated by complex database designs that force your app into rigid molds? With Java, you can turn performance woes into real-time wins.
We’ll tackle the limitations of databases, latency, scalability, and complexity, and explore a Java-native in-memory data processing approach powered by the JVM. Optimized for fast, memory-efficient processing, this high-speed Java-native data layer runs between your app and database, slashing ORM delays, boosting response times, and effortlessly handling gigantic workloads.
Learn to simplify development, cut cloud storage costs, and unlock peak performance with this innovative approach, leveraging the JVM’s efficiency to drive next-level Java app performance.

Markus Kett
CEO at MicroStream, Editor in Chief at JAVAPRO Magazine

Mark Stoodley
Chief Architect for IBM Java
Rethinking Microservice Persistence: Beyond the Database Monolith
Traditional server databases create monolithic bottlenecks in microservice architectures, leading to high complexity, increased effort, and increased development and maintenance costs.
However, there is an alternative in Java. Imagine lightweight, Java-native persistence perfectly aligned with domain-driven design and microservice principles. Each service gains its own, independent data store, eliminating the "database black hole" and enabling rapid, isolated recovery.
This approach simplifies microservice development, eliminates database bottlenecks, ORM complexity, and latencies, reduces infrastructure overhead, and fosters genuine microservice autonomy, driving agility and cost-efficiency.

Christian Kuemmel
MicroStream, Project Manager, Senior Software Consultant
Services Reloaded: Increased Throughput with Project Loom Virtual Threads
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.

Kito Mann
Principal Consultant, Virtua, Inc.
Goodbye Microservices, Hello Self-Contained Systems
Microservices are a popular approach to building modern software, offering scalability and flexibility. But for many teams, they come with challenges like increased complexity, difficult debugging, and managing too many small services.
In this talk, we'll introduce an alternative: Self-Contained Systems (SCS). Unlike microservices, SCS allows each part of your application to operate independently with its UI, logic, and database, simplifying both development and deployment.
You'll learn why SCS can be a better fit for many projects, how it reduces the complexity of distributed systems, and when it makes sense to use this approach over microservices. We'll also dive into my current customer project which shows you how to build self-contained systems using Java and Vaadin.

Simon Martinelli
Programming Architect
Trash Talk - Exploring the memory management in the JVM
In the realm of Java programming, understanding memory management and garbage collection mechanisms cannot only be helpful for optimizing performance and resource utilization but also in general will help you to use the right garbage collector for your application. This session will be about memory allocation, object lifecycle, and garbage collection strategies within the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Attendees will gain insights into memory allocation strategies, object retention policies, and various garbage collection algorithms like generational and concurrent collection. So when you are interested in getting more knowledge about which garbage collector to use best for your application or about memory management in the JVM, this session is for you.

Gerrit Grunwald
Senior Developer Advocate at Azul Systems

Join us in Orlando, Florida
JCON @ IBM TechXchange 2025 is taking place October 6–9 at the Orange County Convention Center, one of the largest and most advanced event venues in the United States.
Located in the heart of Orlando, the “OCCC” offers a vibrant setting for networking, learning, and community building — just minutes away from world-class attractions, hotels, and restaurants.
Whether you're traveling from across the state or across the globe, this iconic venue provides the perfect backdrop for an unforgettable Java experience on an international stage.





Impressions from past IBM TechXchange conferences




Featured Speakers
Motivation
We love Java. That’s why we want to bring together Java developers from all over the world. To learn, to connect, to have fun. The feedback we receive proves us right and motivates us to keep going.
Team
JCON is a team effort and a conference by developers for developers. The JUG Oberpfalz does the heavy lifting in organizing everything. But the heart of the conference are our speakers with their sessions.
Community
We often work in completely different branches, but Java is our common denominator and connects us all. Over the years, not only acquaintances but friendships have formed on account of JCON!