This paper discusses the key aspects and presents the preliminary version of an Object-Oriented programming environment, designed to support distributed applications in heterogeneous, networked UNIX systems. Main characteristics of this environment are: * usage of UNIX-based industry-standard software tools and components; * definition of a simple, C++-like syntax, to facilitate usability and readability of the distributed code; * implementation of a light-weight run-time support, adopting PVM as the base engine. The paper outlines the rationale behind the design of such a programming environment, and discusses in details the solution adopted to remotise interacting objects. In particular, a simple solution for allowing parallel execution of remotised objects is presented. Performance evaluations are currently being carried on.