Spring Annotations are a form of metadata that provides data about a program. Annotations are used to provide supplemental information about a program. It does not have a direct effect on the operation of the code they annotate. It does not change the action of the compiled program.
@Controller Annotation: Spring @Controller annotation is also a specialization of @Component annotation. The @Controller annotation indicates that a particular class serves the role of a controller. Spring Controller annotation is typically used in combination with annotated handler methods based on the @RequestMapping annotation. It can be applied to classes only. It’s used to mark a class as a web request handler. It’s mostly used with Spring MVC applications. This annotation acts as a stereotype for the annotated class, indicating its role. The dispatcher scans such annotated classes for mapped methods and detects @RequestMapping annotations.
Tip: Do read more about Spring @Controller Annotation with Example to get a better understanding.
@RestController Annotation: RestController is used for making restful web services with the help of the @RestController annotation. This annotation is used at the class level and allows the class to handle the requests made by the client. Let’s understand @RestController annotation using an example. The RestController allows to handle all REST APIs such as GET, POST, Delete, and PUT requests.
Tip: Do read more about Spring – REST Controller to get a better understanding.
Let us now come up with a big major difference between the two which is as follows. Here @Controller is used to mark classes as Spring MVC Controller whereas @RestController is a convenience annotation that does nothing more than adding the @Controller and @ResponseBody annotations for which refer to the below code snippet as follows:
@Controller
@ResponseBody
class Controller
{
------
------
------
}
It is equivalent to
@RestController
class RestController
{
------
------
------
}
Let us finally conclude the differences between them via tabular format which is depicted below in a tabular format as follows:
|
@Controller |
@RestController |
|---|---|
| @Controller is used to mark classes as Spring MVC Controller. | @RestController annotation is a special controller used in RESTful Web services, and it’s the combination of @Controller and @ResponseBody annotation. |
| It is a specialized version of @Component annotation. | It is a specialized version of @Controller annotation. |
| In @Controller, we can return a view in Spring Web MVC. | In @RestController, we can not return a view. |
| @Controller annotation indicates that the class is a “controller” like a web controller. | @RestController annotation indicates that class is a controller where @RequestMapping methods assume @ResponseBody semantics by default. |
| In @Controller, we need to use @ResponseBody on every handler method. | In @RestController, we don’t need to use @ResponseBody on every handler method. |
| It was added to Spring 2.5 version. | It was added to Spring 4.0 version. |
