The newest addition to Metrowerks' tools for wireless application development, CodeWarrior Wireless Studio 7, PDA Edition, provides support for building PersonalJava applications for a variety of handheld devices, including the Sharp Zaurus, Pocket PC handhelds such as the iPAQ family from Hewlett-Packard, or other PersonalJava devices such as the Sony Ericsson P800 Symbian phone.

According to the company, CodeWarrior Wireless Studio 7, PDA Edition, provides developers with a debugging-enabled version of the Insignia PersonalJava Virtual Machine, along with Metrowerks' proprietary launch/debug agent and debugger. Metrowerks' said the toolset is designed to enable customers to test and debug applications directly on the device.

The toolset includes Sun Microsystems' PersonalJava Emulation Environment, advanced code completion and a visual Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool that can be used to drag-and-drop Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT) components to automatically generate code.

With the PDA Edition, the company claims developers can compile, run the application through Java Check, package, deploy, emulate, launch or debug with a single mouse click, resulting in a significant increase in productivity by eliminating what, until now, has been a complex manual process. Furthermore, once an application has been tested, CodeWarrior tools can automatically package the software and generate a compressed .IPK or .CAB file -- the packaging format accepted by Sharp Zaurus and Pocket PC devices, respectively -- that is ready for commercial distribution.

As with other CodeWarrior Wireless Studio products, the PDA Edition also supports J2ME technology enabled handsets from Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Siemens, Sprint and others. CodeWarrior Wireless Studio 7, PDA Edition, is expected to ship later this month for $599.