Spting MVC provides us with annotation controller which tells Spring contailner that this class is a specialized component which will act as a controller.

To make REST support easy in Spring, it has added a @RestController annotation which is combination of @Contoller and @ResponseBody (Annotation that indicates a method return value should be bound to the web response body.).

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25242321/difference-between-spring-controller-and-restcontroller-annotation
http://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/current/javadoc-api/org/springframework/web/bind/annotation/RestController.html
http://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/current/javadoc-api/org/springframework/stereotype/Controller.html