Physical Deployment of a J2EE application

I may have missed something in my research and training in J2EE and EJB but is it possible to physically separate the tiers of the application. That is, the JSP's and servlets within a web container run on a physically different machine than the EJB's in the EJB container. And usually, the database is is on its own machine. I normally see the term J2EE server refer to a combination of a web container (aka web server) and EJB container. If this is the case, where does the distributed in "distributed" architecture come in.

With Microsoft ASP and COM+, the server running IIS can be physically separate from the application server hosting the buisness components. How does this relationship translate in J2EE?

[741 byte] By [mhartman] at [2007-9-26 3:33:58]