Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! And what a week it's going to be!

• Do this first: we need your help! Please answer some questions in our State of Spring survey!
• Join me for a look at the latest-and-greatest, chronicling how I got started with Spring Boot in 2024!
• Spring AI 0.8.1, with new support for Google's Gemini, Mistral AI, QDrant vector store, and improvements across the board, has been released!. Also: it should work with AOT! (let us know if it doesn't!)
• Cristian Schuszter sat down with me for a discussion about CERN, what they do, their use of Java and Spring Boot, and so much more in this installment of A Bootiful Podcast.
• Speaking of Spring AI, just last week they announced easy, portable support for function callbacks…

We are happy to announce the milestone 0.8.1 release of Spring AI. Thanks for all the community contributions and great discussion on GitHub issues.

This release has the following new features and improvements.

Google Gemini

Google recently released its Gemini AI Model. It has many exciting features and functionalities; check their release blog for an overview.

Features supported in Spring AI are:

• One of Gemini's marquee features is its multimodal support. This lets you chat with the model using images, videos, and text. For example, you can send the model a photo of a plate of cookies and ask it to give you a recipe for those cookies. Spring AI supports this feature; read more about it here and take a look at the sample application that showcases many Gemini features.
• Streaming and Non-Streaming chat clients
• Function Calling
• Native compilation of Gemini applications
…

NB: the code is here on my Github account: github.com/joshlong/bootiful-spring-boot-2024-blog.

Hi, Spring fans! I'm Josh Long, and I work on the Spring team. I'm excited to be keynoting and giving a talk at Microsoft's JDConf this year. I'm a Kotlin GDE and a Java Champion, and I'm of the opinion that there's never been a better time to be a Java and Spring Boot developer. I say that fully aware of where we stand in the span of things today. It's been 21+ years since the earliest releases of the Spring Framework and 11+ years since the earliest releases of Spring Boot. This year marks 20 years…

Hi, Spring fans! In this installment I talk to Cristian Schuszter, a software engineer at CERN. (This episode was recorded live at VOXXED DAYS CERN!).

Don't forget to help us out with the State of Spring Survey

UPDATE: As of March 13, 2024, Mistral AI has integrated support for parallel function calling into their large model, a feature that was absent at the time of this blog's initial publication.

Mistral AI, a leading developer of open-source large language models, unveiled the addition of Function Calling support to its cutting-edge models.

Function Calling is a feature that facilitates the integration of LLM with external tools and APIs. It enables the language model to request the execution of client-side functions, allowing it to access necessary run-time information or perform tasks…

Hi, Spring fans! In this installment, we continue our look at the venerable Spring Authorization Server, this time looking at how to configure persistence and durability for various aspects of the system

We are excited to announce the State of Spring Survey! Make sure your voice is heard by heading over to https://spring.io/survey and give us your feedback!

Are you excited to use virtual threads? Is AI all hype or is it game changing? What would you change about Spring if you could? (You can, by the way.)

The State of Spring survey is back! Last time we learned that 90% of respondents were looking forward to virtual threads through Project Loom. We learned that building APIs was still the main use case for Spring applications, with plain JSON over HTTP as the number one type of API. We also…

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another exciting roundup of This Week in Spring! I expect many of you are reading this for the first time, especially with Facebook and Instagram being down. People have been exploring all the other lesser-known corners of the web, looking for their daily "doom scroll." Well, you won't find that here, no way, no how! There are no memes here. Well, not often, anyway. No, this is a place for personal growth, reflection, and contemplation on the latest and greatest in the wild and wonderful world of Spring.

• I did an article for The New Stack looking at the New Relic Developer Survey report: We Can Have Nice Things
• Our very own Jason Konicki has a fabulous post about the amazing Spring projects that were released in February - there are a ton! Check them out!
• The Spring Framework lead has a nice blog detailing the expected support timeline for Spring Framework 6.0x and 5.3x, both of which are at least a year old already.
• Spring Integration lead Artem Bilan has a nice post introducing the Spring Functions Catalog.
• In last week's episode of Spring Tips, I continued our series introducing the Spring Authorization Server, this time applying it to support and secure single-page applications and messaging flows. Stay tuned for the last installment, landing tomorrow - Wednesday, the 6th of March, 2024…

On behalf of the Spring team, we are excited to showcase all of the Spring projects that have been released this February.

Spring OSS Releases

The table below contains a list of all the open source projects and their versions that have been released. Each project listed will link to their version details.