Inter-Module API?

I’ve looked a the source for a few plugins that interact with weblogs. It appears they all write their own SQL to access EE weblogs. While that’s all dandy, it’s obviously subject to break if EllisLab ever changes the table structures.

Would be nice if the weblog module would provide a PHP interface so other classes could query it.

Practical Example:

I’ve written a Retail Locator plugin. It utilizes a zipcode table in the database as well as table that provides the information about a given retailer. My plugin executes the queries against the ‘well-known’ structure of these tables to generate results.

The next step is to turn it into a module and provide a CP interface to add/manage retail locations in that table. This feels a bit redundant as it probably could just use a custom weblog and EE would provide the entire interface for managing the records.

So what’s the recommended practice here? Write my own CP UI for stuff like this or utilize the Weblog stuff but run direct queries on the Weblog? Perhaps a custom weblog would cause performance problems - There are 3800 retail locations listed. As all blog entries are stored in a single ‘wide’ table I’m wondering if that would be expeditious…

Thanks, J