Invasive meaning - spreading very quickly all around. Spring author says frameworks like EJB, Struts etc are full of framework specific code which is hard to migrate to other frameworks which is against Java philosophy of write once and run anywhere.
Spring says it noninvasive because it uses POJO to write server side so it can be migrated to any platform. But as suggested by at least 2 contributor it in this post, Spring is cancer contrary to what it claims
spring is a cancer to a project that once it has infected your project you can't do anything without hacking at spring config files ... non-invasive is pretty misleading on that front! – user177800 Mar 11 '13 at 7:18
