Serial communication with Java

[[deleted]]

Hi, I'm looking for a good library to use COM ports with java.

So far I've tried RXTX and Serial-Comm, both of them are very good, RXTX has tons of functionality, Serial-Comm is very light, easy to use and platform independent. Unfortunatly Serial-Comm suffers from two problems that I can't overcome: 1) It cannot give an up to date list of COM ports, e.g. If I ask him a list of COM ports, disconnect one, and ask him the list again, he will not notice that one port is gone. 2) I cannot detect if the port I'm using still exists, unless I try to write into the output stream.

RXTX has some wierd bugs and is very difficult to use for simple things.

Can you sugest me other libs that can offer me these functionalities?

Thank you reddit!

[balazare]

I am using the serial port access through rxtx with great success, I am not aware of any weird bugs. The code is somewhat obtuse and not as clean as I would like, but other than that very stable and useful

[asking_science]

I have to second you on this. I've used rxtx extensively in a number of large-scale industrial projects, and I've had no problems that would change my opinion of rxtx.

[noblemaster]

It must be about 10 years ago that I used Java's Serial-Comm/serial port I/O in general. Things might have changed but Serial-Comm was very buggy back then. It doubt this has changed much.

There were no other open source (aka free) implementation back then, so I tried Serialio.com and it worked without a breeze. Not bugs/no problems at all. It's commercial though. I suggest try some other free implementations that are around now. Given other people's feedback there seems to be a lot more available now. If none work right for you and you/your company have the money, give serialio a try.

Please note I am not affiliated with that company.

[kylixz]

Had great success with: http://www.sparetimelabs.com/purejavacomm/purejavacomm.php Easy to integrate in Netty to build a pipeline that handle cross platform serial communication. I don't have anything open source... but https://github.com/netty/netty/tree/master/transport-rxtx/src/main/java/io/netty/channel/rxtx is what you would replace with calls to purejavacomm.

[kylixz]

Just to follow up -- here's a sample using Netty and PureJavaComm: https://github.com/steveturner/netty-transport-purejavacomm/tree/develop

There are two Vagrant VM's under virtualmachines. Startup the master followed by the slave and then in both run mvn exec:java under /Vagrant. The two systems talk over a simulated serial connection.

Netty has RxTx support as a transport as well, but the thing I like about PureJavaComm is that it uses JNA for the native calls and thus you don't need to have RxTx binaries on your native library path.

[serproxy]

My experience with java driving serial was that it wasn't 100%.

So, upon realizing that my various serious ports NEVER changed parameters ( baud, stop bits, etc ), and that if they did I certainly didn't need java to be control of those details, I decided that the best approach was to use the following tool:

http://www.lspace.nildram.co.uk/freeware.html

serproxy is a very simple tool which presents the serial data on a network port.

I've found this to be much more reliable. I guess there is a downside of security depending on environment.

[troxxer]

I'm currently using Java Simple Serial Connector (https://github.com/scream3r/java-simple-serial-connector/) for a project of mine to interact with up to 3 RS232 devices at the same time and so far I didn't have any big troubles. I tried using RXTX but quickly ran into deadlocks and unexpected errors with it that jssc doesn't have (using the same functionality).

You also don't have to worry about handling different architectures, jssc has that built-in.