Spring @RestController example

In this post,  we are going to see another important annotation called @RestController. It is generally used while working with Spring restful Web services implementation.

Spring MVC tutorial:

• Spring MVC hello world example
• Spring MVC Hibernate MySQL example
• Spring MVC interceptor example
• Spring MVC angularjs example
• Spring MVC @RequestMapping example
• Spring Component,Service, Repository and Controller example
• Spring MVC @ModelAttribute annotation example
• Spring MVC @RestController annotation example
• Spring MultiActionController Example
• Spring MVC ModelMapSpring MVC file upload example
• Spring restful web service example
• Spring restful web service json example
• Spring Restful web services CRUD example
• Spring security hello world example
• Spring security custom login form example

If we need to directly get resource from controller, we need to return @ResponseBody as per Spring 3 but with Spring 4, we can use @RestController for that.
In spring 4.0, we can use @RestController which is combination of @Controller + @ResponseBody.

@RestController = @Controller + @ResponseBody

So

@Controller
public class CountryController {

 @RequestMapping(value = "/countries", method = RequestMethod.GET,headers="Accept=application/json")
 public @ResponseBody List getCountries()
 {
  List listOfCountries = new ArrayList();
  listOfCountries=createCountryList();
  return listOfCountries;
 }

Is same as

@RestController
public class CountryController {

 @RequestMapping(value = "/countries", method = RequestMethod.GET,headers="Accept=application/json")
 public List getCountries()
 {
  List listOfCountries = new ArrayList();
  listOfCountries=createCountryList();
  return listOfCountries;
 }

Instead of annotating each method return type as @ResponseBody, we can directly annotate a class with @RestController. You can see Spring rest Json example to get complete working example on @RestController.