Java on Azure Team Focuses on OpenAI Chat Playground for AI Experimentation -- Visual Studio Magazine

Java on Azure Team Focuses on OpenAI Chat Playground for AI Experimentation

By David Ramel
12/04/2023

Microsoft's sweeping infusion of advanced AI tech throughout its dev tooling continues apace, most recently providing a new focus point for the company's Java on Azure team.

In the cloud, Java rules over languages like C# or TypeScript, so Microsoft's Java on Azure team not only supports the language, it provides the Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ in the JetBrains Marketplace for a competitor's IDE -- or in this case "IDEA." And increasingly in the Azure cloud, AI is becoming top of mind, so that tool is getting more AI-powered capabilities.

**[Click on image for larger view.]** Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ *(source: JetBrains).*

For example, the team recently announced support for the Azure OpenAI Service and associated playground, enabling new AI-based scenarios based on advanced tech from Microsoft partner OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT.

And just last week, the team unveiled a six-month roadmap that sees an enhancement of the "AI experience" as a main focus point along with others concerning the code-to-cloud user journey, a better Tomcat experience and more.

**[Click on image for larger view.]** Java on Azure Developer Tools Roadmap *(source: Microsoft).*

"Our next focus is to leverage Azure OpenAI experience in our toolkit," Microsoft said in a Nov. 29 post. "In previous releases, we have added support for Azure OpenAI and its chat playground, which have been popular among tooling developers. Going forward, we plan to support more models provided by Azure OpenAI Service. Besides, we will also explore how to provide Azure Migration Tools for non-Azure Java Projects to reduce manual work and save time by using the power of AI."

The Azure OpenAI Service provides access to advanced language models from OpenAI including GPT-3, GPT-4 and DALL·E1. The playground, meanwhile, helps developers use prompts and settings to experiment with various models from OpenAI, generating code samples based on Java SDK, JSON and Curl. The playground is used for the experimentation with different prompts and settings from within Azure OpenAI Studio, which includes separate mini-playgrounds for chat, completions and the image-generating DALL·E model.

**[Click on image for larger view.]** Azure OpenAI Playgrounds *(source: Microsoft).*

The completions playground, for example, is simply a text box where developers can submit a prompt to generate a completion and then quickly iterate and experiment with various capabilities.

As noted, the team also is going to improve the Tomcat experience (Java Enterprise), now researching how to support a native Tomcat experience inside IntelliJ IDEA.

The team also plans to keep abreast with Java support for the latest Azure services, such as Flex Consumption support, default Java runtime update for Azure Functions and so on.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.