For my local development of AI applications using Spring AI, I have been used Chroma for a long time. It used to be a very smooth experience. I just installed Chroma using pip and started it using chroma run. In Spring AI, I simply use the Spring Boot starter.

I'm working on a project which is still using Spring 5. When I was trying to use Spring AI in this project, it turned out that the default OpenAIChatModel couldn't be used. This is because OpenAIChatModel uses RestClient, which is only available in Spring 6.