This paper presents the design of HIDOORS,an integrated development environment suitable for embedded distributed real-time systems,based on the Java programming language. HIDOORS will cover all the life-cycle of real-time software development with extensions t existing tools (UML modeling, Java compiler, Java Virtual Machine, and a worst case execution time analysis tool) that will all be integrated into a single integrated development environment. The system will also assist the developer in distributing the application, by providing faster RMI and a distributed event manager that provides strict timing guarantees. This paper is written at the beginning of HIDOORS development, and as such, it presents only the defined objectives and the early architecture of the system; further developments will be the subject of future works.