What do you mean by a application server? If you mean that you have some application implementing your business logic (perhaps as EJB3's) and you then have your portlets as a way to realize your UI towards that application, then surely the portlets and the business app can reside on different servers. But your portlets and JBoss Portal must be on the same server (and it must be a JBoss AS) which makes totally sense. I will not call that a tightly coupled architecture, the Portal is responsible for deploying your portlets, so they logically lives together. Only exception (I can think of) is if you use WSRP, then your portlet can reside in another portal on another server and be shown in your JBoss Portal, but here we are talking about multiple portals not application servers (well actually both). If on the other hand you have realized your business logic inside your portlets, well you have chosen to tightly couple your application and your portlet and IMO you ought to refactor your implementation. View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4240596#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...