Though many technical barriers must be crossed, current trends in materials fabrication suggest several routes to integrating electrooptic and nonlinear optical materials monolithically with silicon and III-V semiconductor technology. These approaches include poled organic polymers, poled fused silica, and polycrystalline or epitaxially grown dielectric and ferroelectric oxide thin films. Optical waveguides fabricated from these materials may enable applications in integrated optics such as frequency doublers and modulators. Although the principal work in our laboratory is on oxide heterostructures on GaAs and sapphire, the introduction highlights the progress of other approaches. Because optical losses limit the feasibility of many device structures, considerable discussion is devoted to this topic. The use of atomic force microscopy to predict scattering losses. The summary is preceeded by some brief remarks about poling.