Hi Spring fans! Happy New Year! And welcome to another installment of This Year in Spring! The year that was… I write this edition from a desk overlooking the beautiful jungle of Martinique, a beautiful island nation in the French Caribbean. I’m sipping some rhum martinique , enjoying the semi-sweltering heat, and thinking about the year that's been 2024. Every year at this time, since 2011, I write this year in spring , an abbreviated look at the year from the rearview mirror. So many amazing things happened this year. It’s sort of difficult to put my finger on any one thing. But, I shall try to narrow it down. To five items. As I always do. We’ll have the week's roundup below, too, as usual. So where to begin? Remember, this is meant to be a roundup of the things that most impressed. The things that most took my breath away. Not a roundup of the latest of a given thing. And there have been a ton of amazing things that fit the bill. Let’s dive right into them. Spring AI C’mon. You saw this coming. I’m a contributor to Spring AI, for Pete’s sake! It’s super good and getting better by the minute! Spring AI is a comprehensive framework for end-to-end integration of the common patterns of AI engineering. It provides robust support for building AI-powered systems and services through the use fo the four pillars of Spring: AOP, portable service abstractions, dependency injection, and auto-configuration. And, it's even at the leading edge of a ton of new and amazing protocols,…Read More