Spring into AI and the last episode of Spring Office Hours 😉

Happy Monday and welcome to another edition of our newsletter. For anyone who celebrates Easter I hope you had an amazing day filled with love, food, family and friends. I was able to take this picture of my family before we went to church yesterday morning. Pro Tip: If you have an iPhone and an Apple Watch you can set your phone on a tripod and take pictures using your watch 🤯

Family Picture on Easter Sunday

Although it's April Fools' Day, I'll skip the jokes as I know you're all too clever for that, so let's get straight to business. Please note that there will be no newsletter next week since my family and I are taking a much-needed vacation. We're off to Marco Island, Florida for some fun in the sun, and I couldn't be more thrilled. I plan to set aside my laptop for a week to recharge ahead of a busy few months. In today's newsletter, I'll discuss Spring AI and some exciting developments with the podcast, Spring Office Hours.

Spring into AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a prevalent topic in today's tech industry. While some may worry about AI taking over their jobs, I am excited about its potential as a tool to enhance my daily work.

Machine Learning is often associated with Python, as it has been the go-to language for training these models for a long time. However, with the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), we are entering a new phase where these models are pre-trained and can be accessed through REST APIs.

Java is one of the most popular programming languages in the world and is used all over enterprise companies. With LLMs like gpt-4 making their services available via REST API you could just call the API with your existing clients. It turns out there is a lot more you have to think about though when it comes to configuration, tokens, prompts, output parsing, embeddings, vector databases and more.

This is why I am particularly excited about a new project in the Spring ecosystem called Spring AI. This project offers an abstraction layer over various LLMs, providing a consistent method of working with them.

Last week I had an opportunity to live stream with my friends over at JetBrains, the maker of my favorite IDE, IntelliJ. I had a chance to talk about AI terminology, Java and AI, Spring AI, and I was able to answer some really great questions from the crowd. Thanks to everyone who joined me live and for those of you who missed it, you can catch the replay below.

Spring Office Hours

I've seen significant growth in the podcast recently and I want to begin by expressing my gratitude to everyone who has supported it. I think we have had some really great topics lately and last week we had the opportunity to talk about Spring Boot 3.3 and Java 22.

Java 22 was recently released, and we examined all the JEPs included in this version. It featured many previews and second previews, including two JEPs from Project Loom (462,464). I had hoped these would finalize in version 22, but we will need to wait. One cool feature that I was excited to see was the ability to launch multi-file source code programs.

423:https://openjdk.org/jeps/423
447:https://openjdk.org/jeps/447
454:https://openjdk.org/jeps/454
456:https://openjdk.org/jeps/456
457:https://openjdk.org/jeps/457
458:https://openjdk.org/jeps/458
459:https://openjdk.org/jeps/459
460:https://openjdk.org/jeps/460
461:https://openjdk.org/jeps/461
462:https://openjdk.org/jeps/462
463:https://openjdk.org/jeps/463
464:https://openjdk.org/jeps/464

We also had a chance to look at what’s coming in Spring Boot 3.3 which will launch on May 23. We took a look at the 3 milestone releases by reviewing the release notes. If you’re interested in learning about Java 22 and Spring Boot 3.3 you can check out the replay of our live stream below

The very last Spring Office Hours 😉

With that said I am sad to say that today’s show is going to be our very last episode of Spring Office Hours. We hope you can drop by and hangout with us and say goodbye to our Podcast. It’s been a lot of fun hanging out with all of you every week but all good things eventually come to an end.

Until Next Week

I hope you enjoyed this newsletter installment, and I will talk to you in the next one. If you have any links you would like me to include please contact me and I might add them to a future newsletter. I hope you have a great week and as always friends...

Happy Coding
Dan Vega
[email protected]
https://www.danvega.dev