hoy mates !
i tried to crosscompile somme appz (i'm working on e17 actually, but it doesn't work :-(), but i didn't succeed to get something easy and handy enought.
I find a way to "natively" compile under a more powerful machine: the key is qemu-arm
it's easy to boot the zdevil debian rootfs with poky's kernel (we also might be good enought to make our kernel with yonggun's patches and config, able to boot on qemu)
then, you have an entire debian armel system with network (nat works out of the box with qemu, you can all well use bridges)
that mean you can let qemu's window on a dirty virtual desktop and connect to debian armel thansk to ssh, then use your terminal emulator as if you where on your laptop or workstation.
in most of the case, downloading sources from apt repositories (apt-get source apps-name) (or from i386 apt-respositories if there's no sources on amrel ones)
and using dpkg-buildpackage are sufficient to get a software ready from your Z
i'll maybe explain it a little more (howto)