Spring AI in Action

Spring AI in Action is the definitive practical guide for Java and Spring Boot developers who want to harness the power of generative AI without switching to Python. Starting from a simple question-and-answer REST service, the book progressively builds a complete 'Board Game Buddy' application that demonstrates retrieval-augmented generation, conversational memory, tool use, Model Context Protocol servers and clients, voice and image generation, observability with Prometheus and Grafana, security with Spring Security, and agentic workflow patterns including the new Embabel planning framework. Written by Craig Walls—author of Spring in Action—the book treats Spring AI as a first-class citizen of the Spring ecosystem, showing how its consistent client abstractions work across OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, Ollama, and other providers, making generative AI capabilities natural extensions of any existing Spring Boot project.

What it argues

A causal model describing how design levers available to Spring Boot developers (prompt engineering, RAG configuration, memory management, tool integration, security controls, observability instrumentation, and agentic composition) drive intermediate psychological and behavioral states in both the system and the developer, ultimately producing outcome metrics such as response quality, operational safety, developer productivity, and system observability.