ChatGPT for Java developers: watch our free webinar

EPAM’s team shared their vision, insights, and best practices on leveraging ChatGPT for Java development in a free webinar. Here are the key takeaways.

tablet with logos of ChatGPT and Java on a blue background

Published in AI05 April 20234 min read

watch the full webinar here

Have you been wondering how your will change with the abundance of AI software development tools? With the emergence of AI coding assistants, software developers now have the opportunity to deliver results faster and with fewer errors.

By embracing the benefits of AI in programming, Java developers can improve their code quality and increase productivity. However, the automation of routine tasks in software development could lead to a reduction in demand for software engineers.

On March 23, 2023, senior Java development experts from EPAM discussed the role of ChatGPT in Java development in a webinar, now available on demand. They answered live questions during their panel discussion, which followed on from a live demo of building a Spring Boot app with AI and a presentation by a guest speaker from ip.labs about using AI in serverless applications. Catch up on the webinar and read through the key takeaways in this article.

watch the full webinar here

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How can you use AI coding assistants as a Java developer?

First, AI for coding is meant to assist Java developers by automating repetitive tasks, giving real-time suggestions on solving coding problems, and helping reduce production errors by upgrading code quality.

By quickly adapting to AI software development tools, you’ll stay in demand as a Java developer and write more accessible and easily maintainable code.

Gaetano Piazzolla

“ChatGPT is a sort of code generator with some insight, but you can use it just to scratch the surface level of a feature. I think this will greatly improve and also drastically change the way we do programming. We can trust this [ChatGPT] to a certain level. It will be challenging to build an application in a programming language I don’t know.”

AI coding assistants can:

Provide code examples as a reference when solving specific programming problems
Suggest different approaches to solving a problem
Help explore new related technologies and contribute to staying up to date with the latest trends

Considering all these benefits, our Java developers have demonstrated a couple of practical use cases for building software applications with ChatGPT. Let’s get into these below.

Building a Spring Boot app with ChatGPT

If you want a more practical application of ChatGPT in your coding practices, our senior Java engineers at EPAM have demonstrated how you can build a Spring Boot app with the help of ChatGPT.

Gaetano Piazzolla, lead software engineer at EPAM Anywhere, ran a live demo and shared his experience communicating with ChatGPT to build a Spring Boot app from scratch. You can catch up on the live demo of building a Spring Boot app here.

The demo of building a Spring Boot app is an interactive process where Gaetano asks ChatGPT for solutions, leading to the point where the code is ready to commit to the repository. In addition, Gaetano showcases the best practices of using AI coding assistant plugins for a more optimized development process.

Building serverless Java applications on AWS with ChatGPT

Java developers can also use ChatGPT when building serverless AWS applications from scratch. Our guest speaker from ip.labs, Vadym Kazulkin, is an AWS community builder and serverless engineering enthusiast who shared his experience using ChatGPT in coding.

Vadym elaborated on how to use Amazon API Gateway to receive requests, AWS Lambda to process the business logic, and Amazon DynamoDB to store the data. During the live presentation, he also explained how to generate the deployment format with different .

An essential aspect of the use of AI in programming that our speakers highlighted in the webinar is that ChatGPT currently uses data from up to 2021 only. Sadly, this limits its capabilities in terms of recent tech updates to AWS or our next webinar.

If you’re interested in how AI coding assistant ChatGPT can help you streamline your production workflow and revolutionize DevOps collaboration, you can watch our next webinar about exploring the intersection of AI and DevOps to learn more about this specific use of AI in coding.

Will AI take over Java developers’ jobs?

The recent bloom of AI technologies has threatened many specialists with potentially losing their jobs to the technology. Nevertheless, we should remember that all emerging technologies still need someone to supervise their outputs. The bottom line is that you still need to know what to ask an AI assistant to do. With proper prompts, you can save time otherwise spent writing code from scratch.

Java development experts at Anywhere believe that integrating AI into coding practices will help obtain a competitive advantage in the job market.

Carlos Ardila

“It is more about possibilities than limitations. It poses challenges, but at the same time, it provides an opportunity for us to actually improve. If I were in a managerial position, I would be happy to hire developers who have experience and be fluent in using AI technologies for coding. So I think AI will not be threatening jobs, but it will revolutionize the way we develop software.”

Jose Cordoba, Senior Software Engineer at Anywhere, likewise believes that we won’t witness a decrease in the number of software developers. On the contrary, this will create new jobs, and more people will be engaged in creating new products and leveraging creativity in many industries.

Vadym Kazulkin

“We are in a world where speed matters. I think the companies that allow and support developers to use AI as a partner will have a competitive advantage. We are just at the beginning of AI, which is already exciting. Let’s see how the AI market grows and continues to rock.”

To sum up, it’s important to remember that artificial intelligence coding assistants are just tools that currently provide answers to coding questions that are only 80% correct. You’ll still need to know a programming language to be able to use the benefits of AI in coding. Software developers are there to solve business problems with high-quality code, and AI can serve to accelerate and aid their job, not take it away.