Comparing Servlets and Portlets Part 1 : Understanding the similarities and differences

People familiar with Servlet technology will be able to relate to Portlets. The concepts are more or less the same for both the technologies.

Lets do a quick walkthrough:

To start with the lets talk about their containers.

A container provides the environment in which the application can run. For running a servlet we will need a web application container like Tomcat.
On similar lines for a Portlet we need a Portlet Container. Most of the Portals today come with an inbuilt Portlet container to serve requests.