Programming environments are typically based on concepts such as syntax and semantics and they provide functionalities such as parsing, editing, type-checking and compilation. But most existing programming environments are designed in a rather integrated manner where parsers, editors and semantic tools are tightly coupled. This leads to systems that are the sum of all their components with obvious implications in terms of size, of reusability and of maintainability. In this paper, we present a proposal for a distributed architecture for programming environments.