(Spring may be the one-stop solution for your enterprise application needs, but Spring is still modular, allowing you to use only the parts you need without attaching others. You can use an IoC container and use Struts on top of it, but you can also choose to use Hibernate in conjunction with code or a JDBC abstraction layer. We designed Spring to be non-intrusive/intrusive (and always will be), which means that usage is largely independent of the framework itself (perhaps certainly minimal, depending on the parts used). This manual provides a functional reference guide for Spring. Since this documentation also requires a lot of work, if you have any requests or comments, please send them to the user mailing list, or submit them to the forum.springframework.org/support forum. In addition, it is necessary to thank Christian Bauer (from the Hibernate team), who rewrote the DocBook-XSL software to create the Hibernate Reference Manual, and we were able to create this document. Thanks also to Russell Healy for his detailed and valuable review of portions of this manual.
Spring3_authoritative development guide.pdf)