Native compilation support for Qdrant and Weaviate

[ThomasVitale]

The work on native compilation support for the vector stores in Spring AI is tracked in #325.

I have created a dedicated issue for Qdrant and Weaviate since the API classes are not defined in this project, requiring a different solution than the rest of the integrations. Instead, the Weaviate And Qdrant Java Client libraries are used. Those libraries depend on the grpc-java project (https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java), which doesn't support native compilation due to a shaded Netty dependency. It's a common problem affecting several Java libraries. Most recently, I encountered the same problem when using the Dapr Java SDK.

An issue was filed in the grpc-java project about this, but eventually closed as not planned: grpc/grpc-java#10601. It would be nice to find a general solution either in the Oracle Reachability Metadata or in the Netty project (see netty/netty#12601), solving the problem for many Java libraries rather than fixing it multiple times across the different libraries.

In the absence of a more general solution, a viable option could be what they did in the Microcks project, providing all the missing configuration explicitly: microcks/microcks#1054.

[markpollack]

Given the tricky landscape you describe, this is low in our priority list given major functional areas we want to reach in a 1.0 release.

[ThomasVitale]

That's fair. I created this separate issue so not to block the work in #325 for other vector stores that won't be affected by this problem.

[iAMSagar44]

@ThomasVitale - thanks for raising this issue. I faced this issue when I was trying to build a native image of an application using Spring AI and Qdrant.
Did you manage to find a workaround to bypass the issue and successfully compile a native image?