Spring: Developing Java Applications for the Enterprise

Defining a Controller

Controllers are the Presentation layer components that are responsible for responding to the user's actions. These actions could be entering a particular URL in the browser, clicking on a link, submitting a form on a web page, or something similar. Any regular Java classes can be transformed into a Controller by simply annotating them with the @Controller (org.springframework.stereotype.Controller) annotation.

And as you have already learned, the @Controller annotation supports Spring's component scanning mechanism in auto-detecting/registering the bean definition in the web application's context. To enable this auto-registering capability, we must add the @ComponentScan (org.springframework.context.annotation.ComponentScan ...