It seems the hurdle with being about to using javax.comm for working with COM ports is the placement of two files win32com.dll and javax.comm.properties. They need to go in the JRE and/or JDK folders, which isn't particularly good making the application easy to distribute to a wide audience.
I'll need to take my programme and use it on a variety of computers where I don't have the privileges to make such changes.
Is there no way to bring these files with my jar and have them work where they lie, as with the comm.jar file itself?
If not, then I'll have to presume that javax.comm isn't going to be of use and find another language to write my programme.