News

Metrowerks unveils PDA testing tool

• By Michael W. Bucken
• November 27, 2002

Metrowerks, Austin, Texas, moved to boost corporate mobile development efforts with the unveiling of CodeWarrior Wireless Studio for PDA devices.

Officials at the Motorola subsidiary said the new version of CodeWarrior is aimed at developers of Mobile Java-based applications for PDAs used in corporate settings.

CodeWarrior Wireless Studio 7, PDA Edition, is slated to ship by year-end and is priced at $599.

The new version of the toolset supports development of Personal Java applications for a variety of handheld platforms, including the iPAQ family from Hewlett-Packard and the Sony Ericsson P800 Symbian phone.

The new PDA version of CodeWarrior Wireless Studio incorporates a debugging-enabled version of the Insignia PersonalJava Virtual Machine coupled with the proprietary Metrowerks launch/debug agent and debugger. Officials said the toolset can enable developers to test and debug applications directly on the deployment device. Utilizing target devices in the test phase can lead to more stable applications, reduce time-to-market for new products and lower support costs for development organizations, Metrowerks officials said.

The toolset also includes the PersonalJava Emulation Environment from Sun Microsystems and a visual Rapid Application Development (RAD) toolset that can drag and drop Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT) components to automatically generate code.

Officials also noted that the new CodeWarrior version 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 -- after the testing process is completed.