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) because they are intended for human viewers while REST API just returns data in form of JSON or XML because most of the REST clients are programs. This difference is also obvious in the @Controller and @RestController annotation.