Spring does not support JAX-RS annotations. If there is a situation where you think they do, then you are mistaken or it's just a coincidence. Period. If you will add any JAX-RS annotations in my Spring MVC program, nothing will happen. Annotations are just metadata. They are not programs. If Spring does not recognize the metadata, it will ignore it. But if you use a JAX-RS annotation in place of a Spring annotation that is used for the same purpose, respective of their framework, then you will not get the expected Spring behavior. So basically, if you are using Spring MVC, remove any JAX-RS dependencies so you don't mistakenly use them.