At the moment i'm using a Arduino Uno micro-controller that is pulling in or "reading" analog data from a sensor circuit. The Arduino IDE has a serial viewer to see data that is being read in through the programming cable that is connected from my USB port to the programming port of the board. The Arduino IDE is limited in functionality and how you can manipulate the data. I would like to capture data as it's being read from the analog input pin on the Arduino Uno and manipulate this data inside an IDE like NetBeans. I would like to do this because I could create GUI interfaces and programs based on this data. However, I've been told that using NetBeans would be very difficult and that I would be better off using Xcode in a C based language or using python to do this capturing of data. Can someone give me some advice on where to start as in what your recommendation is and/or any helpful online sources/articles you would recommend I look at.

An example of what I would like to do with the data is creating active graphs based on the data and having the graph update itself on the fly while data is being read through my serial USB cable.