Let's create a simple Spring MVC controller as follows:

    @Controller 
    public class BasicController { 
      @RequestMapping(value = "/welcome") 
      @ResponseBody 
    public String welcome() { 
      return "Welcome to Spring MVC"; 
     } 
   }

A few important things to note here are as follows:

• @Controller: This defines a Spring MVC controller that can contain request mappings--mapping URLs to controller methods.
• @RequestMapping(value = "/welcome"): This defines a mapping of the URL /welcome to the welcome method. When the browser sends a request to /welcome, Spring MVC does the magic and executes the welcome method.
• @ResponseBody: In this specific context, the text returned by the welcome method is sent out to the browser as the response content. @ResponseBody does a lot of magic--especially in the context of REST services. We will discuss this in Chapter 5, Building Microservices with Spring Boot.