Engineering With Java: Digest #91
AI-driven database access, agent planning patterns, performance tuning, and real-world backend interview problems.
👋 Java Devs! Welcome to this week’s addition! I hope you’re all doing great.
This week, we cover essential insights on:
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Testimonials
Articles Of The Week
Jakarta NoSQL: Why JPA Is Not Enough for the AI Era : As AI-driven applications increasingly rely on document, key-value, graph, and wide-column databases, Jakarta NoSQL offers a standardized Java API that extends familiar JPA-style programming beyond relational systems. Article explores how Java developers can leverage Jakarta NoSQL to build modern, AI-ready applications while maintaining a consistent and productive data access model.
Does Your Programming Language Ever Surprise You in a Good Way? : Author reflects on the joy of discovering elegant language features and libraries that make complex tasks unexpectedly simple. Using Java examples, he highlights how thoughtful APIs and language evolution can improve developer productivity and make everyday coding more enjoyable.
Spring Boot 4.1 Adds gRPC Auto-Configuration, SSRF Mitigation, and Kotlin 2.3 Support : Spring Boot 4.1 introduces built-in gRPC support, SSRF protection for HTTP clients, improved OpenTelemetry integration, and Kotlin 2.3 support. It also adds lazy database connection fetching, async context propagation, and startup-time optimizations, making it a solid incremental release for modern Spring applications.
Java 17 to Java 21 Migration with OpenRewrite: Spring Boot 3.3 Upgrade Guide : The article walks through upgrading a Spring Boot 3.3 application from Java 17 to Java 21 using OpenRewrite recipes to automate much of the migration work. It covers dependency updates, code modernizations, and validation steps, showing how automated refactoring tools can reduce the effort and risk of large-scale Java upgrades.
Batching and Queue Draining Logic in Spring Boot : This article explores how to improve throughput by collecting incoming work into batches and processing it efficiently through queue-draining patterns. It discusses balancing latency, memory usage, and processing efficiency, making the approach useful for high-volume event processing, webhooks, and background jobs.
Introducing Quarkus Data: One Gateway for Data Access : Quarkus Data introduces a repository-style data access layer inspired by Spring Data, letting developers generate CRUD operations and queries from simple interfaces with minimal boilerplate. It aims to provide a lightweight, build-time optimized alternative that fits naturally into the Quarkus ecosystem while preserving performance and developer productivity.
Videos Of The Week
Spring and Security in the times of AI : AI-powered security scanners are dramatically increasing the number of vulnerability reports across open-source projects, including Spring. The Spring team explains how it is handling this surge, why developers should prioritize recent security updates, and how automation and enterprise tooling can help teams keep pace with the growing volume of CVEs
Bootiful gRPC by Josh Long & Dave Syer : This session introduced Spring gRPC 1.0, a first-party Spring project that simplifies building gRPC services and clients with Spring Boot. It provides auto-configuration, observability, security integration, and schema-driven development, making gRPC easier to adopt for high-performance, polyglot microservice architectures.
Plan Before You Build: Deterministic Planning Patterns for AI Agents : This talk explores how modern AI agents are becoming unpredictable due to non-deterministic execution, model variability, and rising token/compute costs. It introduces the need for structured planning, better observability, and evaluation techniques like multi-model “LLM councils” to improve reliability.
Natural Language Data Access in Java with Hibernate, Quarkus, & LangChain4j : This talk explains how to use Hibernate and AI frameworks to query relational databases using natural language. It shows how LLMs generate HQL/SQL using metadata about Java entities and return results via a RAG-style pipeline. Overall, it demonstrates bridging structured data and AI to enable conversational database access.
In-house Blogs
Java Interview Question - Find Minimum Version in Rotated Release History
Spring Boot Interview Question — Your API Went Viral Overnight
Thats all for this week friends! Thanks for reading this far. If you liked it please share with your network.
Happy Coding 🚀
Suraj
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