Linking ArcView™ and XGobi: Insight behind the Front End

This article presents aspects of the implementation of a bidirectional link between the Geographic Information System (GIS) ArcView™ and the interactive dynamic statistical graphics program XGobi. We describe the main functionality of the link, the underlying remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism, and internal data structures, and discuss topics such as security, concurrency, and linked brushing. We think that these topics are of particular interest to software authors intending to link similar software packages, and software users learning about strengths (and weaknesses) of the implementation of our link.