This Year in Spring – 2023

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's December 26th, 2023, and we're staring down the new year! And you know what that means, right? It's time for our annual roundup, looking at all the latest and greatest in the wild and wonderful world of Springdom. This is This Year in Spring. So, here are some of the biggest themes in the year 2023, and then we'll get to our regularly scheduled roundup. Artificial Intelligence (AI) You've no doubt heard all about the incredible leapfrogging advancements being made in the area of artificial intelligence! It's everywhere! Even before ChatGPT leapt onto the scene, we had GitHub's Copilot and Codota showing developers everywhere what an accelerant AI could be for their code. Now the rest of the world sees the potential, too. AI is awesome! And while most of it is implemented in terms of low-level code and Python, most of us don't need to care. In the same way that we don't care in what language most databases are implemented. Most of us don't write our own SQL databases. So, what really matters is the ergonomics of writing applications that integrate AI. And here, I think, Spring AI is particularly compelling. All LLMs offer an API, usually HTTP-based. So that's easy. What else is there? Well, AI offerings deal in terms of tokens – essentially a measure of how much data a given request to the LLM might involve (in both the request and the response). The smaller the number of tokens, the less data you can send the LLM…Read More