Oct 7 – From Project Green to Agents w/ Scott and Colt McNealy
The Java Creation Story
Did you know that Java originally started out as a side quest on an attempt to build a universal remote? Thirty years later, bluetooth is unfortunately the closest thing we have to a universal remote. However, the creation of Java (originally, Project Green) altered the course of computing history. Scott McNealy surprisingly has never written a line of code in his life, but he played a crucial role in the creation of Java. In this talk, he will share insights and stories that he gained from his unique vantage point behind the scenes of the early Java story.
Business Processes as Java Code
Coding agents have captured developers’ imaginations, but adoption in mission-critical business processes has lagged behind coding and personal-assistant use cases, which are far easier to deterministically verify. In this talk, Colt introduces two concepts for building Java-powered business applications with agents: Business-as-Code, which does for business processes what infrastructure-as-code did for system administration, and Decision Workers, a pattern that constrains agent decisions to fuzzy logic while orchestrating deterministic steps, with guardrails enforced in code rather than prompts and skills. Through an interactive demo, you’ll build and run your first Business-as-Code application in Java using local LLMs powered by Ollama and the open-source LittleHorse platform. Bring your laptop if you want to follow along!
Did you know that Java originally started out as a side quest on an attempt to build a universal remote? Thirty years later, bluetooth is unfortunately the closest thing we have to a universal remote. However, the creation of Java (originally, Project Green) altered the course of computing history.
Scott McNealy surprisingly has never written a line of code in his life, but he played a crucial role in the creation of Java. In this talk, he will share insights and stories that he gained from his unique vantage point behind the scenes of the early Java story.
BIO
Scott McNealy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and served as CEO and Chairman for 22 years. Under his leadership, Sun grew from a Silicon Valley startup into a major technology company with more than 30,000 employees, helping pioneer open systems and network computing.
McNealy became one of the technology industry’s most influential leaders and helped popularize Sun’s vision, “The Network is the Computer.” That idea anticipated many of the concepts that later became known as cloud computing.
Coding agents have captured developers’ imaginations, but adoption in mission-critical business processes has lagged behind coding and personal-assistant use cases, which are much easier to verify deterministically.
In this talk, Colt introduces two concepts for building Java-powered business applications with agents: Business-as-Code, which does for business processes what infrastructure-as-code did for system administration, and Decision Workers, a pattern that constrains agent decisions to fuzzy logic while orchestrating deterministic steps, with guardrails enforced in code rather than prompts and skills.
Through an interactive demo, you’ll build and run your first Business-as-Code application in Java using local LLMs powered by Ollama and the open-source LittleHorse platform. Bring your laptop if you want to follow along!
BIO
Colt is the founder of LittleHorse Enterprises and the original engineer behind the LittleHorse Kernel, which is the core of LittleHorse Enterprises’ platform for harnessing AI Agents and Microservices.
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