Explain the difference between spring @Controller and @RestController
annotation

In the Spring framework, @Controller and @RestController are annotations used to define classes that can handle HTTP requests, but they serve different purposes and have distinct behaviors.

@Controller Annotation

The @Controller annotation marks a class as a Spring MVC Controller, which is part of the Spring Web MVC framework. It is used to build traditional web applications that render views, typically returning HTML content. When a class is annotated with @Controller, it becomes a candidate for auto-detection through classpath scanning and can be discovered by the Spring framework as a controller.

A @Controller-annotated class handles incoming HTTP requests by using handler methods. These methods can return a view name, which is then resolved by a ViewResolver to render the response with a view technology like JSP or Thymeleaf. If you want a method in a @Controller class to return a response body (like JSON or XML) instead of a view, you would use the @ResponseBody annotation on the method level[1][2][3].

@RestController Annotation

The @RestController annotation, introduced in Spring 4.0, is a specialized version of the @Controller annotation that is designed for building RESTful web services. It is a convenience annotation that automatically includes the @Controller and @ResponseBody annotations. This means that all handler methods in a @RestController-annotated class assume @ResponseBody semantics by default, and the return value of each method is written directly to the HTTP response body, typically in a format like JSON or XML[1][2][3].

When using @RestController, you do not need to annotate each handler method with @ResponseBody, as you would with a traditional `@Control...