I Originally asked this question in SO but on advice I have moved the question here... I'll admit I'm a spring newbie, but you can correct me if I'm wrong, this one liner looks kinda fishy in a best practices sort of way: @RepositoryRestResource(collectionResourceRel="people"...) public interface PersonRepository extends PagingAndSortingRepository<Person, Long> For those who are unaware, the following does many things: It is an interface definition that can be registered in an application context as a jpa repository, automagically hooking up all the default CRUD operations within a persistence context (that is externally configured). and also configures default controller/request-mapping/handler functionality at the namespace "/people" relative to your configured dispatcher servlet-mapping. Here's my point. I just crossed 3 conceptual layers with one line of code! this feels against my seperation-of-concern instincts but i wanted to hear your opinion. And for the sake of being on a question and answer site, I would like to know whether there is a better way of seperating these different layers - Service, Data, Controllers - whilst maintaining as minimal configuration as possible