The use of distributed architectures in the computing world has been growing quicklyn due to the emerging computer tecnology, that gives them more process and storage capacity and permits their interconnection by powerful communication networks. These architectures are the base for building distributed applications. However, it is necessary to develop tools that help the project and implementation of these applications, abstracting the developer from the complexity of these architectures. The RIO environment has been developed at PUC with the objective of marking the distributed application developing more simple, modular and easily reconfigurable. The objective of this survey is to analyse the RIO environment from an important point of view: its portability. Alternatives to improve it are presented and, as an application, the implementation of one of them, namely POSIX.