The document provides an introduction to the Spring Framework. It discusses that Spring is a lightweight application framework that addresses all tiers of an application and provides services traditionally provided by application servers. It can integrate with J2EE servers and replace some of their services. Spring brings consistency to application structure and provides elegant integration with standard interfaces like Hibernate and Struts. The core of Spring provides inversion of control/dependency injection and an AOP framework. It also includes service abstraction layers for transaction management, data access, emailing, and remoting. Spring integrates well with web frameworks and provides its own MVC framework.