Spring Office Hours S4E26 - Groovy, Google and Gemini with Guillaume Laforge
Sep 9, 2025
Guillaume Laforge, co-founder of the Apache Groovy programming language and Developer Advocate at Google Cloud, shares his journey from Groovy's inception to the forefront of serverless tech and generative AI. He discusses Groovy's seamless Java integration and its practical applications in tooling like Gradle and Jenkins. Guillaume highlights how Java developers are embracing AI and the essential criteria for evaluating large language models. With insights on the Agent Development Kit and the latest Java features, he shows how coding is evolving in the AI landscape.
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Origins: Live Scripting For Java Apps
- Guillaume built Groovy to let users script and customize a running Java app without redeploying.
- He used it to let end users add UI components and business rules live on Tomcat-hosted SaaS systems.
Career Pivot To Developer Advocacy
- Guillaume moved from full-time Groovy work after layoffs in 2015 and transitioned into developer advocacy.
- He joined Google in 2016 to advocate for serverless and later AI technologies while keeping ties to Groovy.
Java Fits AI Through APIs
- Most AI integration work is about calling models via APIs, not retraining new models.
- Java developers can use existing SDKs and REST endpoints to integrate LLMs into enterprise systems easily.
