Difference between servlet and web service

Question

What is the difference between these 2? I found few results on google nothing conclusive.

Here is a follow up question:

Say I create spring mvc web app ann

Answer 1

The most obvious difference between Servlet and Web Service is: You access servlet via HTTP while access Web Service via SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). But, in fact, you can not directly invoke a servlet, you can only open URL connection and put some parameter to the servlet if the caller is out of your application. And you can not restrict what parameters the caller can put. The caller does not know what parameters your servlet can receive either. So, You'd better use web service to provide API to other applications, the WSDL file of your web service can give the caller enough information to invoke your web service.