In this paper, we reviewed of several portable parallel programming paradigms for use in a distributed programming environment. The Techniques reviewed here are portable. These are mainly distributing computing using MPI pure java based, MPI native java based (JNI) and PVM. We will discuss architecture and utilities of each technique based on our literature review. We explored these portable distributed techniques in four important characteristics scalability, fault tolerance, load balancing and performance. We have identified the various factors and issues for improving these four important characteristics.