what was the idea of coming up the name 'servlet': serve + let

Question

This is not asking about how servlet works, I am just curious about how they came up with the name 'servlet' literally?

Since I am not a native English speaker, I don't get the subtle meaning of the using the word 'serve' and suffix it with 'let'.

Answer 1

When Java was new in the mid-1990s, one of the features that made it popular on the young world-wide web was applets. The suffix "-let" indicates something that's small. Applet = little application that runs on a website. In the 1990s that was amazing, since websites at that time were mostly not interactive and consisted of only text.

Servlets were invented a few years later, but the name is probably related. A servlet is a little application running on a server, in contrast to an applet which is a little application running on a client (browser).