Ok, that sound's more like what I'm looking for. And that should be available at the University level?

It does do more than data processing, but I think Java, excluding any external libraries, is not geared towards messing with hardware directly. I searched long and hard for a serial interface for Java, and while there are some available, many are either out of date, or non-free. There's a company somewhere that provides a Windows XP (by now it's probably Vista) interface for Java, but they're "working" on an interface for linux. Again, that was a few months ago, they may have finished both libraries. I was looking for something that would either work on Linux, Mac and Windows or exclusively Linux and Mac, and I found it in pyserial. I tried writing my own library in C, but I haven't a clue how to do that.

Well, if you go to search.cpan.org and enter 'serial' you'll get plenty of pre-written modules. Of course this is perl, but it's easier than C (having used both for yrs).
Mind you, a good background knowledge of C is useful anyway.

But presently my application is pure Java, and from what I know perl and Java don't mix too well. Sounds like a lot of running binaries and reading standard output, which is ugly in Java. Maybe it works fine but it seems a little shaky to me. I'll try it thought, maybe I can gleam something from the pearl modules I can port to the Java or Python version.

the best way to learn is to explore things for yourself