The Spring Framework is the leading full-stack Java/JEE application framework. It provides a lightweight container and a non-invasive programming model enabled by the use of dependency injection, AOP, and portable service abstractions.

NoSQL storages provide an alternative to classical RDBMS for horizontal scalability and speed. In terms of implementation, Document stores represent one of the most popular types of stores in the NoSQL space. The document database supported by Spring Data are MongoDB and CouchDB, though just MongoDB integration has been released to date.

The goal of the Spring Data Document (or DATADOC) framework is to provide an extension to the Spring programming model that supports writing applications that use Document databases. The Spring framework has always promoted a POJO programming model with a strong emphasis on portability and productivity. These values are caried over into Spring Data Document.

Notable features that are used in Spring Data Document from the Spring framework are the Features that particular, features from the Spring framework that are used are the Conversion Service, JMX Exporters, portable Data Access Exception hierarchy, Spring Expression Language, and Java based IoC container configuration. The programming model follows the familiar Spring 'template' style, so if you are familar with Spring template classes such as JdbcTemplate, JmsTemplate, RestTemplate, you will feel right at home. For example, MongoTemplate removes much of the boilerplate code you would have to write when using the MongoDB driver to save POJOs as well as a rich java based query interface to retrieve POJOs. The programming model also offers a new Repository approach in which the Spring container will provide an implementation of a Repository based soley off an interface definition which can also include custom finder methods.