After using RXTX for a number of different projects, I\'ve come across many annoying discrepancies and issues that can only sensibly be put down to bugs in the library - dea
I use socat configured to serve a socket for a serial port. The downside is that baud rate etc. is given to the socat invocation, it is not something you can readily alter from your program. On the upside is I can connect across a network without anything more than changing the IP address I connect to.
We have moved to java-simple-serial-connector which seems to be very stable and comfortable at the current release 0.9.0. For now, it works on windows and linux systems. We use it for modem interactions.
There's a few of them out there now, now that Arduino is pretty popular.
There's Serialio
and PureJavaComm, but it's pretty early on in development from what I can see.
it really depends on what your needs are. RXTX has been ported pretty much everywhere, so it is widely available.
One of the issues of RXTX I faced was the delay closing the port. When checking with setserial the port configuration I discovered a parameter closing_delay=3000. This means that the port closes 3 sec after the close() method was executed. Resetting the closing_delay toany value is ignored by RXTX. RXTX insists in 3sec delay.
the JSSC library performed to our satisfaction
There's serial-comm too.
Serial communication in Java is a mess. I've had trouble with jSSC with a virtual usb serial on linux, but with serial-comm it connected.
RXTX is a mess.
At least I think that now this SO question has all of the worth mentioning serial communication java libraries.
Serialio lib is $49/platform/developer seat which gets you unlimited distribution in unlimited apps so not too pricey. The Mac library has been stable and reliable for us in an undemanding application and availability/compatibility has been good throughout for the various Mac platforms and OS/X releases.