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.

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.