The redirect: prefix and The forward: prefix

Ref:- http://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/1.2.9/reference/mvc.html

13.5.3.2. The redirect: prefix

While the use of RedirectView works fine, if the controller itself is creating the RedirectView, there is no getting around the fact that the controller is aware that a redirection is happening. This is really suboptimal and couples things too tightly. The controller should not really care about how the response gets handled. It should generally think only in terms of view names, that have been injected into it.
The special redirect: prefix allows this to be achived. If a view name is returned which has the prefix redirect:, then UrlBasedViewResolver (and all subclasses) will recognize this as a special indication that a redirect is needed. The rest of the view name will be treated as the redirect URL.
The net effect is the same as if the controller had returned a RedirectView, but now the controller itself can deal just in terms of logical view names. A logical view name such as redirect:/my/response/controller.html will redirect relative to the current servlet context, while a name such as redirect:http://myhost.com/some/arbitrary/path.html will redirect to an absolute URL. The important thing is that as long is this redirect view name is injected into the controller like any other logical view name, the controller is not even aware that redirection is happening.

13.5.3.3. The forward: prefix

It is also possible to use a special forward: prefix for view names that will ultimately be resolved by UrlBasedViewResolver and subclasses. All this does is create an InternalResourceView (which ultimately does a RequestDispatcher.forward()) around the rest of the view name, which is considered a URL. Therefore, there is never any use in using this prefix when using InternalResourceViewResolver/InternalResourceView anyway (for JSPs for example), but it's of potential use when you are primarilly using another view technology, but want to still be able to in some cases force a forward to happen to a resource to be handled by the Servlet/JSP engine. Note that if you need to do this a lot though, you may also just chain multiple view resolvers.
As with the redirect: prefix, if the view name with the prefix is just injected into the controller, the controller does not have to be aware that anything special is happening in terms of handling the response.