This Week in Spring - May 14th, 2024

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring!

This week’s highlights in the Spring ecosystem emphasize the ongoing advancements and applications of Spring AI. The discussions range from exploring the impressive VectorStore abstraction and enhanced structured output support to practical integrations with platforms like Azure OpenAI and Neo4J. There are several posts this week about how Spring AI can power intelligent applications. The celebration of Spring Boot’s 10th anniversary with its cofounders and a historical reflection by Spring founder Rod Johnson further underscore the community’s enduring innovation and commitment to evolving with cutting-edge technologies. Basically, this week seems like a celebration of where we’ve been and a discussion of where we’re going.

A huge part of that future is AI. Did you see that OpenAI just announced their Spring Update? It’s not the same as this Spring update! Theirs has more whizbang demos, but this one has more spelling errors. We are the same. And theirs also includes news of GPT4o. It’s phenomenal, and sees ChatGPT’s day-to-day integration opportunities catch up with (and maybe leapfrog?) multimodal systems like Google’s Gemini.

My hunch? AI is going to be everywhere - even more than it already is! - before too long. Are you ready? Is your application ready? There are amazing opportunities here, and Spring AI is an amazing tool for AI engineering to help you to integrate production-worthy AI features into your application.

There’s a lot to cover, so let’s dive in!

• On last week’s A Bootiful Podcast, I talked to Spring Boot cofounders Phil Webb and Dr. David Syer on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Spring Boot.
• In last week’s installment of Spring Tips, I explored Spring AI’s impressive VectorStore abstraction.
• Speaking of Spring AI, they have just enhanced support for structured output.
• Spring AI founder Dr. Mark Pollack and Microsoft’s Asir Selvasingh discuss Spring AI and Azure OpenAI in this fantastic webinar.
• Check out this insightful blog on modulith observability with OpenTelemetry and the incredible Spring Modulith starter.
• Broadcom leader Ryan Morgan gave a fascinating interview on theCUBE, discussing, among other things, the exciting Spring AI project.
• Microsoft’s Brian Benz delivered a great talk on Spring AI at the epic GIDS conference.
• Here’s a nice blog introducing the concepts in Spring AI.
• Remember, not all LLMs are hosted! There are many models, optimized for various purposes, available through hubs like Ollama and HuggingFace. You can use them all with Spring AI. This blog explains how.
• Neo4J Developer Advocate Jennifer Reif has an excellent blog on using Spring AI and Neo4J (also a fantastic vector database) together.
• Spring founder Rod Johnson gave a fascinating interview about the history of Spring and SpringSource in this engaging podcast.