Devoxx France 2025: the age of pragmatism and tooled-up AI
From 16 to 18 April 2025, the Palais des Congrès in Paris hosted the 13th edition of Devoxx France. Our experts attended to explore current trends and shifts in the development world. Here’s a look back at the highlights from this year’s event.
Our experts at Devoxx France
This year’s theme, “Back to Basics”, delivered on its promise. Following a 2024 edition already marked by artificial intelligence and a renewed focus on technical pragmatism, we saw a deeper perspective emerge: AI is a tool, not an end in itself. This insight leads us to a redefinition of the developer’s role.
Devoxx France 2025: AI is no longer "hype" - it's a toolbox
Gone are the wild fantasies about imminent revolutions. Instead, we heard practical use cases, feedback from the field, and a more clear-eyed stance on AI’s real limitations and applications.
Notably, in the opening keynote, Luc Julia (one of Siri’s original designers) reminded us that AI creates nothing. Like a hammer, it can be used for good or ill.
Far from Hollywood scenarios, discussions now focused on fine-tuning, RAG, specialised models, energy efficiency – and even technological sovereignty.
On the practical side, several talks explored current uses of AI:
- Test strategy generation
- Automated testing (from unit to end-to-end)
- Framing code generation using TDD and architectural guidelines
- Smart assistants within IDEs (Cline, GitHub Copilot…)
- Agent-based architectures using Function Calling and MCP
The tools are ready — but our mindset must evolve: it’s no longer just about writing code, but about designing effective solutions.
Diagram - The Gartner Hype Cycle
Java : consolidation, performance and efficiency
Java continues to mature with the upcoming release of Java 25, the next LTS expected in September 2025. The focus now is on consolidation and continuous improvement.
There’s no language revolution, but significant enhancements: the Foreign Function & Memory API, Gatherers API, and Project Leyden for faster startup times and reduced carbon footprint. These developments reinforce trends we already discussed in our March article on Java 24.
We also observed a drop in enthusiasm around GraalVM, in favour of a more realistic view of its actual use cases.
Hibernate and fine-tuned performance management were central to many highly technical talks — aiming to regain control over memory, queries, and resource consumption.
Diagram – JVM Warm-Up Time
Architecture: pragmatism first
A key trend this year – already noticeable in 2024 – was the growing consensus that architecture is no longer the sole domain of architects (Solution, Technical or Enterprise).
All stakeholders, especially developers, are now encouraged to embrace architectural thinking with a mindset rooted in pragmatism, adaptability, and simplicity.
Many case studies highlighted the value of design patterns like microservices, Domain-Driven Design, hexagonal architecture, and Event-Driven Architecture – provided they're applied thoughtfully.
Because ultimately, the developer’s primary goal is to solve business problems. Technology is a means, not an end. After a period of perhaps overly zealous enthusiasm for architectural models, it’s time to return to core principles:
- SOLID: Single Responsibility, Open/Closed, Liskov Substitution, Interface Segregation, Dependency Inversion
- YAGNI: You Aren’t Gonna Need It
- DRY: Don’t Repeat Yourself
- KISS: Keep It Simple and Stupid
Clean architecture, DDD, modular monoliths... architectures are evolving – but in a more thoughtful, context-aware manner.
Diagram – The SOLID, DRY, KISS and YAGNI Principles
Devops: on the road to maturity?
DevOps is transitioning into Platform Engineering, where dedicated teams create internal platforms to streamline infrastructure for product teams. This approach industrialises DevOps best practices, making CI/CD tools, infrastructure and components reusable.
Kubernetes is now a cornerstone of modern architecture, with a mature ecosystem (ArgoCD, Helm) enabling automation and best practice enforcement. OpenTelemetry is emerging as the standard for unified observability, enabling better performance diagnostics alongside Kubernetes.
GitOps automates infrastructure and deployment management through Git, providing traceability, governance, and rollback capabilities. This declarative and auditable approach reinforces automation in the application lifecycle.
Diagram - Platform Engineering
Data: scale and insight
Data volumes keep rising, but it’s the increasing maturity of tools and practices that stood out this year.
Arrow and Iceberg are modern pillars of data pipelines: Arrow enhances in-memory processing for fast exchanges, while Iceberg structures long-term storage with advanced metadata (ACID transactions, versioning) on formats like Parquet.
PostgreSQL is emerging as a powerful general-purpose database, thanks to its rich functionality and ecosystem. Extensions like pg_vector bring it into the AI realm (e.g. vector search), offering a simpler, robust alternative to multiplying niche databases.
Observability is moving from metric collection to operational intelligence– correlating metrics, logs, and traces for deeper system understanding, anomaly detection and performance tuning. This requires fine instrumentation (OpenTelemetry) and correlation tools (Signoz, Grafana).
Security: education, AI and secure pipelines
In 2025, security goes beyond audits and chasing critical bugs. At Devoxx, it was presented as a culture to promote, tools to embed, and stories to tell.
AppSec (Application Security) now benefits from educational methods like storytelling, using concrete examples to raise awareness and encourage better habits.
AI brings both new threats and powerful tools, which can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines. AI-driven tools can detect, classify and even propose fixes for vulnerabilities – automating security integration into the development lifecycle.
Meanwhile, the widespread adoption of SBOMs (Software Bill of Materials) improves visibility over software components. Coupled with automated vulnerability scanning in CI/CD, this approach enables continuous security monitoring with contextual alerts – reinforcing prevention.
Devoxx France 2025: other notables trends
Front-end: simplicity and accessibility make a comeback
Few talks this year focused on React or Angular.
Instead, HTMX gained traction as a lightweight, eco-friendly alternative to traditional SPAs. With strong momentum in the State of JS and several dedicated talks, this “AJAX comeback” stands out for its simplicity and efficiency.
A clear message in a world increasingly concerned with complexity and green IT.
Devex and best practices
In 2025, improving Developer Experience (DevEx) means better tooling, good practices, and smart AI.
Tools like OpenRewrite enable automated refactoring. Containers, Kubernetes and Kafka are now stable foundations with established conventions. Generative AI, with an evolving GitHub Copilot, offers contextual support that goes far beyond autocomplete – becoming a true assistant for developers when used wisely.
Organisation and mindset: moving beyond dogma
Several talks at Devoxx 2025 challenged rigid organisational approaches. “Ritualised” agility came under scrutiny: when it becomes a goal in itself, it may hinder more than help.
A consensus is forming: what matters isn’t “doing Scrum”, but delivering value, taking ownership, and measuring real impact.
The product mindset is maturing. The focus is less on frameworks and more on vision, team alignment, and user feedback. Collaboration between tech, product and business stakeholders is key – with an emphasis on clarity and accountability. Being agile in 2025 means staying clear-headed, adaptable, and grounded in reality.
Conclusion - Devoxx France 2025: towards a more mature, responsible tech
Devoxx 2025 confirms a deep trend: we’ve moved past the peak of hype – whether in AI, microservices, or Kubernetes.
The focus now is on consolidation, continuous improvement, product-centric thinking, and mindful tech usage.
A big thank you to the speakers and organisers for yet another inspiring edition.
See you in 2026!
Pierre-Antoine Pinard Bertelletto, Chief Technology Officer, SQLI France
Philippe Bousquet, CTO Bordeaux, Head of Java Community, SQLI France
Emile Chomton, Technical Expert
