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I am looking to make a data visualization tool that will visualize biological data. I am used to being a C# and .net coder. However, as I understand it, you can run into trouble if you are running a C# app in ubuntu. Any suggestions for a language to use with these specifications in mind? I was thinking Java but am happy to take suggestions.
C# is a solid choice, especially if you already know the language. C# and the .NET framework have a solid cross-platform port with the Mono project and you can create Gnome UIs using the Gtk# bindings.
As an alternative, Java is used for a lot of bioinformatics applications. Though personally I have to say that most of those have horrible user interfaces and Java’s memory management seems ill-suited to deal with the data sizes that are common in bioinformatics – tools routinely run out of memory or become extremely slow. This isn’t necessarily an inherent problem of Java as much as sloppy programming, but Java certainly doesn’t help.
An alternative to Java would also be Python with a suitable GUI library (there are some good ones), especially since Python offers a much nicer, more polished syntax.
Yet another alternative that’s worthwhile especially if you’re really dealing with big data or if performance is important, would be C++ with Qt to build the GUI. Note that this will make development vastly more complicated if you’re not already proficient in C++.