I mentioned last time that serial ports, while on the wane, are
still around in one form or another, especially in the embedded
world. Although official support in Java for the serial port is
anemic, there is good third-party support and so if you want to
use Java, you can use the serial port. Where Java shines, of
course, is network programming. Not only that, most languages
have good support for networking thanks to the Internet fad (I'm
kidding — even I don't think it's a fad). It might be nice if
you could treat a serial port like a network socket. Then you
could use a wide range of tools to access it. Besides that, if
you could run a server that managed the socket, you could place
the server and the serial port in one place and then access it
from anywhere on the network. Sounds like a good idea? It is
such a good idea that there are several implementations of it
and an RFC (RFC 2217). If you use Linux, there is a program
called sredird that you can either build or get from most
distributions. If you rea