Difference between @RestController and @Controller Annotation in Spring MVC and REST Read more: http://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2017/08/difference-between-restcontroller-and-controller-annotations-spring-mvc-rest.html#ixzz4sbGy2Glh The @RestController annotation in Spring MVC is nothing but a combination of @Controller and @ResponseBody annotation. It was added into Spring 4.0 to make the development of RESTful Web Services in Spring framework easier. If you are familiar with the REST web services you know that the fundamental difference between a web application and a REST API is that the response from a web application is generally view (HTML + CSS + JavaScript) while REST API just return data in form of JSON or XML. This difference is also obvious in the @Controller and @RestController annotation. The job of @Controller is to create a Map of model object and find a view but @RestContr...