title: How does Spring MVC convert @RequestParam values?
body: <p>I'm new to the Spring Framework, and as a symptom, I want to keep my adoption of its Web MVC portions as simple as possible, so I'm using the annotation functions to work with Spring. In the past, I've used: <br>
  <code>int value = Integer.valueOf(request.getParameter("numberValue"))</code> <br>to pull values from parameters - explicitly converting the String returned by <code>getParameter()</code>.<br> Helpfully, I've noticed that when I use Spring's  terminology:<br><code>@RequestParameter("numberValue") int numVal</code><br>
  the conversion is handled automatically. This is nice, but a "black box" to me. I tried looking at questions on here or in the Spring documentation, but all that information deals with custom conversions (like Converter) for objects or formatting issues. All I want to know is how Spring handles primitive type conversions for <code>@RequestParam</code> by default.</p>