Canoo Engineering AG has announced a new version of its tool for building RIAs (rich Internet applications) for mobile devices and thin-client terminals.

Basel, Switzerland-based Canoo this week announced that it has adapted its ULC (UltraLightClient) technology to run on J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) clients, enabling the development of rich Internet applications for mobile devices and terminals.

Canoo has developed a sample application to demonstrate an online shopping experience on a PDA. The company will release the prototype behind this application as a new product called ULC Mobile.

ULC is a library to develop RIAs in Java. Canoo said ULC is a pure Java-based alternative to other RIA technologies such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Macromedia Flex.

Canoo officials said ULC offers a high degree of code maintainability, reliability, scalability, performance and security.

In addition, the ULC Mobile solution runs on both J2SE (Java 2 Standard Edition) and J2ME clients, the company said. And ULC-based applications can be deployed in a J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) container as a portlet or standalone, Canoo officials said.

A developer license for ULC costs $1,499, including runtime distribution.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.