The Future of Java in the Age of AI Agents - James Ward | The Marco Show

James Ward (Developer Advocate at AWS, Agentic AI Foundation Technical Committee Member) joins Marco to map out the fast-moving landscape of AI agents on the JVM. From MCP and ACP to Spring AI, Embabel, and Ktor — James explains how the JVM ecosystem has not only caught up with Python for building agents, but may have surpassed it. He also introduces SkillsJars (putting agent skills on Maven Central), explains effect-oriented programming and why it supercharges AI coding, and shares how he's been shipping five projects in two months entirely from his phone.

💡 In This Episode

• Why the JVM is no longer second-class for AI agents

• MCP vs ACP vs A2A — when to use which

• Spring AI, Embabel (Rod Johnson), Ktor, LangChain4J compared

• GOAP planning and domain-integrated context engineering

• Agent skills vs MCP servers — and why skills are winning

• SkillsJars: versioned, composable skills on Maven Central

• Testing non-deterministic agents with evals

• Effect-oriented programming and why types matter more than ever

Timestamps:

(00:00:00) Intro

(00:00:49) Guest intro: James Ward, AWS, and the Agentic AI Foundation

(00:01:37) Are developers now orchestrating AI agents?

(00:02:51) Agent setup, context switching, and review fatigue

(00:05:58) Why typed languages matter more in the AI era

(00:07:14) Scala vs Kotlin vs Java

(00:10:02) What agentic frameworks are and why they matter

(00:14:08) MCP explained

(00:19:42) ACP explained

(00:21:56) How to get started with agent protocols and frameworks

(00:23:43) JVM agent frameworks: Spring AI, Embabel, Koog, and LangChain4j

(00:27:50) AIforJVM.com and building projects with AI

(00:29:55) AI from your phone, dopamine, and productivity

(00:33:14) Testing, evals, orchestration, and reliability in agent systems

(00:41:03) What skills are and where they fit

(00:43:46) SkillsJars and packaging skills for the JVM

(00:49:34) Which AI standards will actually last?

(00:55:35) Effect-oriented programming explained

(01:06:37) Giveaway question

(01:08:24) Rapid-fire round

(01:10:58) Outro

New episodes every other Wednesday. Subscribe for more developer-focused conversations.

🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ACP0Nx-sW10