Java agents and their instrumentation API offer developers the most powerful toolset to interact with a Java application. Using this API, it becomes possible to alter the code of running applications, for example to add monitoring or to inject security checks as it is done by many enterprise products for the Java ecosystem.

In this session, developers will learn how to program Java agents of their own that make use of the instrumentation API. Doing so, developers learn how the majority of tooling for the JVM is implemented and will learn about Byte Buddy, a high level code generation library that does not require any knowledge of Java byte code that is normally required for writing agents. In the process, developers will see how Java classes can be used as templates for implementing highly performant code changes that avoid the boilerplate of alternative solutions such as AspectJ or Javassist while still performing better than agents implemented in low-level libraries such as ASM.