What are the phases of servlet life cycle?

We know that Servlet Container manages the life cycle of Servlet, there are four phases of servlet life cycle.

1. Servlet Class Loading – When container receives request for a servlet, it first loads the class into memory and calls it’s default no-args constructor.
2. Servlet Class Initialization – Once the servlet class is loaded, container initializes the ServletContext object for the servlet and then invoke it’s init method by passing servlet config object. This is the place where a servlet class transforms from normal class to servlet.
3. Request Handling – Once servlet is initialized, its ready to handle the client requests. For every client request, servlet container spawns a new thread and invokes the service() method by passing the request and response object reference.
4. Removal from Service – When container stops or we stop the application, servlet container destroys the servlet class by invoking it’s destroy() method.