Serial communication from JavaScript?

This is an old question, but in case this helps anyone else, Chrome Apps have access to a serial API - http://developer.chrome.com/apps/serial.html - which might help.

It's Chrome specific (obviously..), but Chrome is available cross-platform so might answer the question.

JavaScript itself doesn't have any built in functionality to allow you to access the serial port. However, various JavaScript engines (v8, rhino, etc) allow you to write your own custom native objects.

You might want to check out node.js, which is a JavaScript library for v8 that's focused on writing server-side code (rather than web browser client code). It seems that someone's already written a serialport package for that:

https://github.com/voodootikigod/node-serialport

There's a cross platform plugin for serial port communication called jUART.