❯ Guillaume Laforge

An ADK Java GitHub template for your first Java AI agent

java agent-development-kit large-language-models ai-agents

With the unveiling of the Java version of Agent Development Kit (ADK) which lets you build AI agents in Java, I recently covered how to get started developing your first agent.

The installation and quickstart documentation also helps for the first steps, but I realized that it would be handy to provide a template project, to further accelarate your time-to-first-conversation with your Java agents! This led me to play with GitHub’s template project feature, which allows you to create a copy of the template project on your own account or organization. It comes with a ready-made project structure, a configured pom.xml file, and a first Java agent you can customize at will, and run from both the command-line or the ADK Dev UI.

➡️ Clone the adk-java-maven-template project! ⬅️

The project follows a standard Java project structure:

project_folder/ ├── pom.xml └── src/ └── main/ └── java/ └── com/ └── example/ └── agent/ └── HelloWeatherAgent.java

The pom.xml build file declares the two ADK dependencies:

<!-- The ADK core dependency --> <dependency>  <groupId>com.google.adk</groupId>  <artifactId>google-adk</artifactId>  <version>0.1.0</version> </dependency> <!-- The ADK dev web UI to debug your agent --> <dependency>  <groupId>com.google.adk</groupId>  <artifactId>google-adk-dev</artifactId>  <version>0.1.0</version> </dependency>

And the HelloWeatherAgent.java class shows how to create a simple agent:

//... LlmAgent.builder()  .name("hello-weather-agent")  .description("Hello World")  .instruction("""  You are a friendly assistant,  answering questions in a concise manner.   When asked about weather information,  you MUST use the `getWeather` function.  """)  .model("gemini-2.0-flash")  .tools(FunctionTool.create(HelloWeatherAgent.class, "getWeather"))  .build(); //...

An agent that makes use of a tool to request weather forecasts:

//... @Schema(description = "Get the weather forecast for a given city") public static Map<String, String> getWeather(  @Schema(name = "city",  description = "Name of the city to get the weather forecast for")  String city) {  return Map.of(  "city", city,  "forecast", "Sunny day, clear blue sky, temperature up to 24°C"  ); } //...

There are two ways to run the agent, via the command-line:

mvn compile exec:java \  -Dexec.mainClass="com.example.agent.HelloWeatherAgent"

Or the ADK Dev UI:

mvn compile exec:java \  -Dexec.mainClass="com.google.adk.web.AdkWebServer" \  -Dexec.classpathScope="compile"

Which will show the nice and handy development UI, to help you prototype and debug your agent:

😃 Happy Java AI agent building! 🛠️