The X Window System is now being used in a wide variety of application programs. One application area that is currently very popular is that of multimedia and graphics programs.
Users often run several such programs simultaneously.
Their work may, for example, involve combining the media data produced by several X programs into a single unified database. For example, when I author World Wide Web documents such as this column, I use separate programs to edit my text, graphics, and multimedia. Unfortunately, the state of the art in X inter-client communication makes multimedia data interchange somewhat difficult. Let's look at the major interchange protocols and some of their problems. While the X Toolkit and Motif APIs to these protocols are fairly easy to use, much the semantics of the data transfer are left up the source and destination programs.