Central Iowa Software Symposium - No Fluff Just Stuff

Central Iowa Software Symposium

September 12 - 13, 2024

Building Intelligent Spring Applications with Spring AI

Friday - Sep 13 1:00 PM CDT - JORDAN CREEK

By now, you've no doubt noticed that Generative AI is making waves across many industries. In between all of the hype and doubt, there are several use cases for Generative AI in many software projects. Whether it be as simple as building a live chat to help your users or using AI to analyze data and provide recommendations, Generative AI is becoming a key piece of software architecture.

So how can you implement Generative AI in your projects? Let me introduce you to Spring AI.

For over two decades, the Spring Framework and its immense portfolio of projects has been making complex problems easy for Java developers. And now with the new Spring AI project, adding Generative AI to your Spring Boot projects couldn't be easier! Spring AI brings an AI client and templated prompting that handles all of the ceremony necessary to communicate with common AI APIs (such as OpenAI and Azure OpenAI). And with Spring Boot autoconfiguration, you'll be able to get straight to the point of asking questions and getting answers your application needs.

In this handson workshop, you'll build a complete Spring AIenabled application applying such techniques as prompt templating, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), conversational history, and tools invocation. You'll also learn prompt engineering techniques that can help your application get the best results with minimal “hallucinations” while minimizing cost.

Craig Walls

Craig Walls

Author of 'Spring in Action' and 'Building Talking Apps'

Workshop Requirements

This session is a workshop. Please come prepared.

In the workshop, we will be using…

  • Java 17+
  • An IDE of your choosing (I will be using IntelliJ IDEA)
  • OpenAI's API (you will need an account and a small amount of credit $5 is more than enough).

Optionally, you may choose to use a different AI provider other than OpenAI such as Anthropic, Mistral, or Google Vertex (Gemini), but you will need an account with them and some reasonable amount of credit with them. Or, you may choose to install Ollama (https://ollama.com/), but if you do be sure to install a reasonable model (llama3:latest or gemma:9b) before you arrive.

Know that if you choose to use something other than OpenAI, your workshop experience will vary.

About Craig Walls

Craig Walls is a Principal Engineer, Java Champion, Alexa Champion, and the author of Spring AI in Action, Spring in Action, and Build Talking Apps. He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring. When he's not slinging code, Craig is planning his next trip to Disney World or Disneyland and spending as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 1 bird and 2 dogs.