This week LangChain4j, the LLM orchestration framework for Java developers, released version 0.26.1, which contains my first significant contribution to the open source project: support for the Imagen image generation model. Imagen is a text-to-image diffusion model that was announced last year. And it recently upgraded to Imagen v2, with even higher quality graphics generation. As I was curious to integrate it in some of my generative AI projects, I thought that would be a great first contribution to LangChain4j. Read more...

My go-to framework when developing Java apps or microservices is Micronaut. For the apps that should have a web frontend, I rarely use Micronaut Views and its templating support. Instead, I prefer to just serve static assets from my resource folder, and have some JavaScript framework (usually Vue.js) to populate my HTML content (often using Shoelace for its nice Web Components). However, the static asset documentation is a bit light on explanations. Read more...

A while ago, my friend Sylvain Wallez shared a little bookmarlet on Twitter/X that transforms a dark mode site into light mode. I know the trend is towards dark mode, but for a lot of people with certain vision issues, for example with astigmatism like me, certain dark modes can very painful. This site about vision (and you’ll find other similar references) mentions that: People who have myopia or astigmatism also may experience halation (from the word “halo”). Read more...

In Java, builders are a pretty classical pattern for creating complex objects with lots of attributes. A nice aspect of builders is that they help reduce the number of constructors you need to create, in particular when not all attributes are required to be set (or if they have default values). However, I’ve always found builders a bit verbose with their newBuilder() / build() method combos, especially when you work with deeply nested object graphs, leading to lines of code of builders of builders of… Read more...

In this article, we’ll figure out how to create slugs. Not the slobbery kind of little gastropods that crawls on the ground. Instead, we’ll see how to create the short hyphened text you can see in the URL of your web browser, and that is often a URL-friendly variation of the title of the article. Interestingly, one of the most popular posts on my blog is an almost 20 year old article that explains how to remove accents from a string. Read more...

A promising feature of the Gemini large language model released recently by Google DeepMind, is the support for function calls. It’s a way to supplement the model, by letting it know an external functions or APIs can be called. So you’re not limited by the knowledge cut-off of the model: instead, in the flow of the conversation with the model, you can pass a list of functions the model will know are available to get the information it needs, to complete the generation of its answer. Read more...

When using a service like Google Cloud Workflows, in particular as your workflows get bigger, it can be difficult to understand what’s going on under the hood. With multiple branches, step jumps, iterations, and also parallel branches and iterations, if your workflow fails during an execution, until now, you had to check the execution status, or go deep through the logs to find more details about the failed step. I have good news for you! Read more...

Hot on the heels of the release of Gemini, I’d like to share a couple of resources I created to get your hands on large language models, using LangChain4J, and the PaLM 2 model. Later on, I’ll also share with you articles and codelabs that take advantage of Gemini, of course. The PaLM 2 model supports 2 modes: text generation, and chat. In the 2 codelabs, you’ll need to have created an account on Google Cloud, and created a project. Read more...

Google announced today the availability of Gemini, its latest and more powerful Large Language Model. Gemini is multimodal, which means it’s able to consume not only text, but also images or videos. I had the pleasure of working on the Java samples and help with the Java SDK, with wonderful engineer colleagues, and I’d like to share some examples of what you can do with Gemini, using Java! First of all, you’ll need to have an account on Google Cloud and created a project. Read more...

Some friends shared this article from Uwe Friedrichsen, tilted back to the future, that talks about this feeling of “déjà-vu”, this impression that in IT we keep on reinventing the wheel. With references to mainframes, Uwe compared CICS to Lambda function scheduling, JCL to step functions, mainframe software development environments to the trendy platform engineering. There are two things I like about this article. First of all, it rings a bell with me, as we’ve seen the pendulum swing as we keep reinventing some patterns or rediscovering certain best practices, sometimes favoring an approach one day, and coming back to another approach the next day. Read more...