Simple Serial Connector Service

A plugin for JetBrains IDEs exposing jscc - Java Simple Serial Connector serial library as a service to allow multiple plugins to share the library and provide serial port connectivity without conflicting with each other.

To make the service compatible with the JetBrains maintained Serial Port Monitor plugin, the service and associated interfaces were copied into this plugin.

The idea was that if Serial Port Monitor plugin is installed then this plugin's JsscSerialService will delegate all calls to the Serial Port Monitor's JsscSerialService. If the Serial Port Monitor plugin is not installed, then this plugin will provide the service via its own implementation using the jscc - Java Simple Serial Connector library.

Effectively, any plugin can implement serial monitoring by including this plugin as a dependency and seamlessly provide serial port communication with or without Serial Port Monitor being installed or compatible with an earlier version of the IDE.

The fly in the ointment is that it is not possible to use Serial Port Monitor's classes in a dependent plugin. This means that for now, using this library may still conflict with Serial Port Monitor loading of native libraries. That said, it is still preferable to implement serial port connectivity by using this plugin as a dependency, to avoid conflicting with other plugins.

The service in this plugin was too permissive by allowing anyone to write to a connected port by using the port name. The interface was changed:

removed write() method for writing to port
changed connect() method to return a SerialPortOwnerAccess instance to be used for writing to the connected port.

Adding SimpleSerialConnectorService to your plugin

Modify the gradle build script to add the github repository for the plugin package, and define your github user and a personal access token (see Creating A Personal Access Token) in the environment variables: GITHUB_ACTOR, GITHUB_TOKEN.

repositories {
  maven {
      name = "GitHubPackages"
      url = "https://maven.pkg.github.com/vsch/SimpleSerialConnectorService"
      credentials {
          username = System.getenv("GITHUB_ACTOR")
          password = System.getenv("GITHUB_TOKEN")
      }
  }
}

Modify the gradle build script to add this jar as a compileOnly dependency:

dependencies {
  compileOnly("com.vladsch.plugins:simple-serial-connector-service:1.0.4")
}

Add the plugin to plugin.xml as a dependency:

<depends>com.vladsch.plugins.SimpleSerialConnectorService</depends>

In your plugin get the instance of the service via JsscSerialService.getInstance() and use its methods to get a list of available ports, connect to a specific port, test port name validity, test whether a port is connected, close port, etc. see: JsscSerialService.java

Notes

Plugin Page on JetBrains Marketplace

The plugin uses jscc - Java Simple Serial Connector, Licensed under GNU Lesser GPL 3