| Mostly used traditional Spring MVC service. |
Represents RESTful web service in Spring. |
| It is mostly used in Spring MVC service where model data needs to rendered using view. |
It is used in case of RESTful web service that returns object values bound to response body. |
If response values need to be converted through HttpMessageConverters and sent via response object, extra annotation @ResponseBody needs to be used on the class or the method handlers. |
The default behavior of the @RestController needs to be written on the response body because it is the combination of @Controller and @ResponseBody. |
@Controller provides control and flexibility over how the response needs to be sent. |
@RestController annotation has no such flexibility and writes all the results to the response body. |
