adam bien's blog

BCE pattern from 1992: top-level packages named by context not by layer, at most 3 sub-packages: Boundary, Control, Entity, @Transactional belongs only on the Boundary — one button push equals one use case equals one transaction, Hibernate Validator skipped in favor of custom Control-layer validation for precise 400-error handling, zero-dependency MCP server by Mr. Aldo from France: built with BCE and zero-dependency principles, Agent Smith live demo: zero-dependency Java 25 agent framework in ~130KB single JAR, transcriber agent with episodic memory and agent delegation, GPU Llama / TornadoVM: Apple Metal support for running Mistral and DevStral locally, plans to run Agent Smith without cloud, Z ecosystem: ZDate, ZJDocFind, ZUnit single-file test runner in ~300 lines with parallel execution, ZB build tool — all zero-dependency Java 25 scripts, LLMs understand standards better than frameworks — enables lean code generation without external dependencies, Enterprise Fire April 1st skill: converting Hello World to 73 classes with all patterns, hexagonal architecture appears for the first time on AirHacks, upcoming AirHacks Live summer workshops on spec-driven Java development and front-ends without dependencies

Do you have any more questions? See you at: airhacks.live

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Topics for the 145th airhacks.tv:

1. airails.dev microprofile-server skill: @Transactional in the boundary vs. control layer for bulk processing and synchronous API calls
2. BCE architecture in Jakarta Faces applications - how to structure them
3. Local inference with Tornado / Java GPULLama3
4. airails.dev microprofile-server skill: why never use quarkus-hibernate-validator? Alternatives to manual validation
5. MCP server with Zero-framework / BCE architecture by Aldo Lushklja: zdtp-mcp, blog post
6. Agent zSmith news
7. zeeds (Java Zero-Dependency Seed Scripts) news

See you every first Monday of the month at https://airhacks.tv 8pm CET (UTC+1:00). Show is also announced at: meetup.com/airhacks.

Ask questions during the show via twitter mentioning me: https://twitter.com/AdamBien (@AdamBien),using the hashtag: #airhacks or built-in chat at: airhacks.tv. You can join the Q&A session live each first Monday of month, 8 P.M at airhacks.tv

1. JCON Europe 2026: Livecoding: Creating Beautiful Java Code With LLM and Agents
   conference talk JCON Europe 2026 Cologne, Germany 21 April 2026
   https://schedule.jcon.one/2026/speakers
2. Devoxx Greece 2026: Your Java Code Is Your LLM Prompt
   conference talk Devoxx Greece 2026 Athens, Greece 23 April 2026
   https://m.devoxx.com/events/dvgr26/talks/13551/session-by-adam-bien
3. JAX, Mainz: Business Logic First: Escaping Java's Bloat Addiction
   conference talk JAX, Mainz Berlin, Germany 5 May 2026
   https://jax.de/serverside-enterprise-java/business-logic-first-java/
4. JAX, Mainz: Live Coding Production Java: Incremental Development with LLMs
   conference talk JAX, Mainz Berlin, Germany 5 May 2026
   https://jax.de/big-data-machine-learning/java-incremental-development-llm-java/
5. Geecon: The 50x Developer: Java's Unfair Advantage in the Age of AI Agents
   conference talk Geecon Krakow, Poland 14th May 2026
   https://2026.geecon.org/speakers/info.html?id=1062
6. VibeKode Conference: How To Write Great Code with LLMs #vibeless
   conference talk VibeKode Conference Munich, Germany 24 June 2026
   https://vibekode.it
7. Spec-Driven Java Development at LLM Speed[online event]
   online workshop 2 July 2026
   https://workshops.adam-bien.com
8. LLM-Assisted Web Components: No Frameworks, No Dependencies. Just Web Standards[online event]
   online workshop 16 July 2026
   https://workshops.adam-bien.com
9. airhacks.tv Questions and Answers #livestream[online event]
   live streaming show first monday of the month, 8pm CET
   https://www.meetup.com/airhacks/

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes|

Java 25 script files (JEP 512: Compact Source Files and Instance Main Methods and JEP 458: Launch Multi-File Source-Code Programs) are self contained, but can specify a classpath in the shebang.

#!/usr/bin/java --class-path=zcl.jar  --source 25
void main() {
  Log.user("Hello, duke");
}

zunit is a zero-dependency, single-file Java 25 Script test runner. It discovers *Test.java source files and runs each directly via java --source 25. No compilation step, no JUnit, no build tool required — just run zunit.

A GreeterTest.java example:

void main() {
    var greeting = Greeter.greet("World");
    assert Objects.equals("Hello, World!", greeting) : "expected 'Hello, World!' but got: " + greeting;
}

Each test is a self-contained Java source script with a void main() method. Any thrown exception or non-zero exit code indicates test failure. Each test gets its own JVM — full execution isolation with zero shared state.

Run it with:

1. zunit to auto-detect and run all tests,
2. zunit -cp:zbo/app.jar for an explicit classpath
3. zb && zunit to build with zb first.

zunit is available from: github.com/AdamBien/zunit

The corresponding airails.dev skill is available from: github.com/AdamBien/airails/tree/main/java/zunit

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The talk covers how to build Java applications that auto-scale, are highly available, and run without traditional infrastructure overhead.

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes| RSS

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes| RSS

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes| RSS

"Java 25 scripting is more capable than anticipated and produces shorter code than Python equivalents, LLMs know Java specs by heart due to publicly available specifications and stable APIs, grounding LLMs on JAX-RS and CDI specs eliminates hallucinations, BCE architecture works well with LLM code generation, junior developers can leverage LLMs to learn faster than ever before, Java 26 brings HTTP/3 client and structured concurrency and vector API, web components are the fastest UI technology being native to browsers, zero-dependency Java scripts replace Python and shell scripts, AI Rails skills system allows modular reuse of Java source code, java.util.logging with System.Logger facade is recommended over external logging frameworks, Java 9 JPMS was the main migration blocker from Java 8, measuring AI usage percentage as KPI is as problematic as code coverage metrics, brownfield projects benefit most from LLM assistance with good templates"

Ask questions during the show via twitter mentioning me: https://twitter.com/AdamBien (@AdamBien),using the hashtag: #airhacks or built-in chat at: airhacks.tv. You can join the Q&A session live each first Monday of month, 8 P.M at airhacks.tv

1. Preparing for the AI era as Java developers
2. airails.dev updates
3. Java 26 features: 10 JEPs including HTTP/3, Structured Concurrency, AOT Object Caching, Lazy Constants, PEM Encodings, Vector API
4. Time machine: 100 episodes back (44th episode):

   JavaONE talk: Java EE heavyweight or lightweight Mythbusters and the comparison to Spring, How to build a progressbar with HTML 5, JAXB deprecation in Java9, Virtual DOM vs createElement performance, Reference Implementations of EE4J, Issue with org.eclipse.ee vs. javax.*, Impact of Java SE release strategy to EE4j or JavaEE, EJB Timer synchronization in cluster, DB Views vs. JPA for reports, Architectural considerations with REST and Redis, Critique of the "Roller blogger engine" Java EE clone, Accessing SFSB from SLSB, SFSB and scalability, State and async JAX-RS

Any questions left? Ask now: gist.github.com/AdamBien/5c85d2a2d3b2079fc5d55209dd8fcc61 and get the answers at the next airhacks.tv. Some questions are also answered with a short video: 60 seconds or less with Java

Ask questions during the show via twitter mentioning me: https://twitter.com/AdamBien (@AdamBien),using the hashtag: #airhacks or built-in chat at: airhacks.tv. You can join the Q&A session live each first Monday of month, 8 P.M at airhacks.tv

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes| RSS

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes| RSS

"LLMs have been trained on decades of freely available Java specifications, including JSRs, JEPs, MicroProfile and Jakarta EE. They know the patterns. They know the standards. Now let's put them to work. In this live coding session, we'll use LLM agents to build production-ready Java applications quickly. No slides, no theory - just real code, real prompts, and real results. We'll start with a typical enterprise requirement and demonstrate how to guide LLMs to generate clean, maintainable Java code following BCE/ECB architecture patterns that actually work in production. Bring your questions - we'll answer them with code."

"In this special episode of the Inside Java Podcast, Nicolai Parlog talks to Adam Bien about scripting with Java, to Maurice Naftalin about the history and tradeoffs of the collections framework and erasure, and to Tom Cools about the innovative way the Belgian Java User Group organizes itself."

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes| RSS

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes| RSS

1. AI tools in software development: European companies' fear of AI solutions vs. the rest of the world -- will the EU fall further behind?
2. Upcoming JDK 26 features worth waiting for
3. Number of Java "shorts" tools in daily use
4. MCP server for Maven Central repository
5. airails.dev announcement
6. Zero Dependency Java Seeds announcement: github.com/adambien/zeeds
7. Time machine: 100 episodes back (43rd episode):

   JavaONE 2017 News: keynotes, impressions, EE4J, project FN, Dynamic JMS listeners, SSO, timeout and JWT, Serverside rendering vs JavaScript UI, openJDK vs. Oracle JDK in Docker, User properties and Keycloak, Testing JAX-RS with Keycloak, 2 EARs one EJB jar problem, Java EE and logging, JSF conversations with architects, Java EE versioning strategies, User-friendly URIs in MVC / Ozark, Optimistic and pessimistic locking, Ideas for overengineering Pet Projects, WildFly Datasource configuration in Docker, @RequestScope with @Suspended, Implementing a batch job, POJO and JsonObject serialization in Java EE, Qualifier instantiation in Java EE, JPA-level security, bind vs. self / this in JavaScript

Any questions left? Ask now: gist.github.com/AdamBien/0ca87bbd4b765764c5de295fc34ac6b6 and get the answers at the next airhacks.tv. Some questions are also answered with a short video: 60 seconds or less with Java

Ask questions during the show via twitter mentioning me: https://twitter.com/AdamBien (@AdamBien),using the hashtag: #airhacks or built-in chat at: airhacks.tv. You can join the Q&A session live each first Monday of month, 8 P.M at airhacks.tv

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes| RSS

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes| RSS