How Spring MVC supports REST Resources?

Spring has long had some of the ingredients needed for exposing REST resources.
Starting with version 3.0, however, Spring began adding enhancements to Spring MVC
to provide first-class REST support.

Spring supports the creation of REST resources in the following ways:

• Controllers can handle requests for all HTTP methods, including the four primary REST methods: GET, PUT, DELETE, and POST. Spring 3.2 and higher also supports the PATCH method.
• The @PathVariable annotation enables controllers to handle requests for parameterized URLs (URLs that have variable input as part of their path).
• Resources can be represented in a variety of ways using Spring views and view resolvers, including View implementations for rendering model data as XML,JSON, Atom, and RSS.
• The representation best suited for the client can be chosen using Content Negotiating ViewResolver
• View-based rendering can be bypassed altogether using the @ResponseBody annotation and various HttpMethodConverter implementations.
• Similarly, the @RequestBody annotation, along with HttpMethodConverter
  implementations, can convert inbound HTTP data into Java objects passed in to
  a controller’s handler methods.
• Spring applications can consume REST resources using RestTemplate.