Hi John,
You do not need to do this in C. In fact you can do it in just about any language. The librarys are exported to a shared object, so as long as your language can make calls to a .so, you are good to go. I am positive that java has this capability.
Hope this helps out! If you need the driver, it is available at www.ni.com/linux.
Best Regards,
Aaron K.
Application Engineer
National Instruments