Serial Port Communication for Java SE Embedded
By Jim Connors 18 August 2011

The need to communicate with devices connected to serial ports is a common application requirement.  Falling outside the purview of the Java SE platform, serial and parallel port communication has been addressed with a project called RXTX.  (In the past, you may have known this as javacomm).  With RXTX,  Java developers access serial ports through the RXTXcomm.jar file.  Alongside this jar file, an underlying native layer must be provided to interface with the operating system's UART ports.  For the usual suspects (Windows, Linux/x86, MacOS, Solaris/Sparc), pre-compiled binaries are readily available.  To host this on an alternative platform, some (hopefully minimal) amount of work is required.

Here's hoping the following notes/observations might aid in helping you to build RXTX for an embedded device utilizing one of our Java SE Embedded binaries.  The device used for this particular implementation is my current favorite: the Plug Computer.

Notes on Getting RX/TX 2.1-7-r2 Working on a Plug Computer

1. At this early juncture with Java 7, be wary of mixing Java 7 with code from older versions of Java. The class files generated by the JDK7 javac compiler contain an updated version byte with a value that results in older (Java 6 and before) JVMs refusing to load these classes.

2. The RXTX download location http://rxtx.qbang.org/wiki/index.php/Download has binaries for many platforms including Arm variants, but none that worked for the Plug Computer, so one had to be built from source.

3. Using the native GCC for the Plug Computer and the RXTX source, binaries (native shared objects) were compiled for the armv5tel-unknown-linux-gnu platform.

4. The RXTX "stable" source code found at the aforementioned site is based on version rxtx 2.1-7r2.  This code appears to be pretty long in the tooth, in that it has no knowledge of Java 6.  Some changes need to be made to accommodate a JDK 6 environment.  Without these modifications, RXTX will not build with JDK6

SUGGESTED FIX, most elegant, not recommended:
Edit the configure.in file in the source directory and look for the following:

    case $JAVA_VERSION in
    1.2*|1.3*|1.4*|1.5*)

and change the second line to:

    1.2*|1.3*|1.4*|1.5*|1.6*)

Upon modification, the autogen.sh script found in the rxtx source directory must be re-run to recreate the ./configure script.  Unfortunately, this requires loading the autoconf, automake and libtool packages (plus dependencies) and ended up resulting in libtool incompatibilies when running the resultant ./configure script.

RECOMMENDED FIX:
Instead, edit ./configure and search for the occurrences (there are more than one) of

    case $JAVA_VERSION in
    1.2*|1.3*|1.4*|1.5*)

and change the second line to:

    1.2*|1.3*|1.4*|1.5*|1.6*)

Run './configure', then 'make' to generate the RXTXcomm.jar and platform specific .so shared object libraries.

5. You may also notice in the output of the make, that there were compilation errors for source files which failed to find the meaning of "UTS_RELEASE".  This results in some of the shared object files not being created.  These pertain to the non-serial aspects of RXTX.  As we were only interested in librxtxSerial.so, this was no problem for us.

6. Once built, move the following files into the following directories:

    # cd rxtx-2.1-7-r2/
    # cp RXTXcomm.jar $JAVA_HOME/lib/ext
    # cd armv5tel-unknown-linux-gnu/.libs/
    # cp librxtxSerial-2.1-7.so $JAVA_HOME/lib/arm
    # cd $JAVA_HOME/lib/arm
    # ln -s librxtxSerial-2.1-7.so librxtxSerial.so

Now Java applications which utilize RXTX should run without any java command-line additions.

The RXTXcomm.jar file can be downloaded here.  To spare you the effort, a few pre-built versions of  librxtxSerial-2.1-7.so are provided at this location:

If you've gone through this exercise on any additional architectures, send them my way and I'll post them here.

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