Spring AI and Java in 2024

Java is one of the most widely used programming languages, and a key contributor to its success is VMware Tanzu’s Spring, the most common framework for Java development. The Spring Framework is built on top of the Java Virtual Machine and provides a consistent programming and configuration model for application developers. From inception, it was designed with developer experience and modularity in mind.

The open-source application framework has been accelerating Java development times since its inception in 2004 (Happy 20th birthday). Since then, the platform has been expanding: growing 50% year over year during the last five years. In this blog we’re exploring what makes Spring important to Java, how the framework influenced the developer experience, and a look at the latest version of Spring, which introduces features to support AI integration.

Spring Success

Two decades ago, there were dozens of different ways to connect to a database, something just about every application has to do at some point. “At the time, the various approaches were very cumbersome: developers wrote a lot of code and gained very little functionality,” explained Mark Pollack, a Senior Staff Engineer, Tanzu Division, Broadcom. “Spring provided a lot of value by simplifying the process. Just getting a single app to talk to a database, present a web form, and do transactions correctly was a huge win. In that era, developers could spend weeks trying to create that function.”

Another reason for its success is its enterprise-focus. Most open source projects concentrate on the consumer market. However, large companies invest a lot of money building applications to run their businesses. “At the end of the day, large corporations’ largest expense is probably their developers,” explained Ryan Morgan, Senior Director of Engineering, Tanzu Division, Broadcom. Spring makes developer teams more efficient, which greatly enhances the bottom line.

Through the years, the ecosystem has grown. “There’s a large and vibrant community behind Spring,” noted Tanzu’s Morgan. Now, it has more than 200 different technology starters. These software building blocks make it simpler for software engineers to integrate their code with different third-party systems.

Get a Great Start

Development problems evolve over time, so various elements were added. Spring Initializer is a bootstrapping tool, a way for developers to create a new project. “Normally, software engineers started from a blank piece of paper and had to figure out what type of project it was and what type of libraries were needed,” said Tanzu’s Morgan. Then, they searched the web to find some place in the documentation that told them what library dependency was needed to add for different pieces of functionality. Then invariably, you cut and pasted from something that wasn’t consistent. You ended up with a mess.”

With Spring Initializer, software engineers go to a website which has clear instructions about what the options are and presents them in a typical web form. Then, they enter the Generate command and out comes a shell that they can use to start building their program. The solution does not generate any code but solves the problem of finding the right application dependencies. Developers start faster and are less frustrated than previous methods.

Under development is Spring CLI, which not only creates the shell of the app but also includes code. The advances have a significant impact because 1 million new projects are created each month.

Meet the Need for Development Speed

The last 10 years have seen a major move to container deployment and Spring has aligned with this paradigm shift. “Really, when you think about all those cloud native patterns, a lot of those container functions are really baked into our projects already,” stated Tanzu’s Morgan. “If you want to do distributed configuration, we have a solution for that. You want to do service discovery; Spring has patterns and tools for that.”

Recently, a major change to Spring occurred. Rather than release new functions autonomously, they are gathered and bundled into Spring Boot. Version 3.0, which is based on Spring Framework 6.0, requires Java 17 or above. Previously, Spring supported Java 8, so the change is significant for some companies.

Better performance is one benefit from the change. “We’ve seen customers realize 15% performance improvements, just from doing the upgrade,” said Tanzu’s Morgan.

Java Supports Generative AI

AI is being woven into many applications, especially with the emergence of Generative AI solutions. They represent a quantum leap in capabilities and overall intelligence compared to previous iterations of AI. One reason why today’s generative models are gaining so much attention is that they work with much larger volumes of information (hundreds of billions of words) and larger data models (hundreds of billions of parameters) compared to previous AI systems. They possess impressive and unprecedented power. Consequently, they can perform very sophisticated functions.

However as developers try to take advantage of the functionality, platform diversity again presents development challenges. “OpenAI has their API, Amazon Bedrock offers a different one, and so do other companies,” noted Tanzu’s Pollack.

A guiding focus and design principle in the Spring framework is simplifying such work by providing common abstractions over similar technologies and interfaces. Spring AI is quickly becoming the starting point when Java developers write AI applications. “Spring AI has the common patterns that Spring developers are used to,” noted Tanzu’s Pollack. It can abstract out models, clients, etc. in ways that are familiar to Spring users.”

Another crucial part of AI applications is using a vector database. Spring supports multiple vector databases, and its portable API simplifies changing implementations. So, Spring streamlines AI application development.

Java has been a popular programming language for enterprises for decades. Spring provides software engineers with tools that help them enhance the development process. The framework has reached its 20th year of empowering developers, and its years, engaged community is laying the groundwork for continued expansion in the coming decades. “Maybe one reason why Spring continues to do well is it constantly tries to improve itself and doesn’t just rest on its laurels,” concluded Tanzu’s Pollack.

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