Populating Expression Engine data from external applications

Hello,

I created an Aperture plug-in to upload photos to an Expression Engine blog using the MetaWeblog API. Aperture (and other photo cataloging software like Adobe Lightroom, iPhoto, iMatch or Microsoft Expression Media) contains lots of metadata about each photo. This includes IPTC, EXIF and rating information. Aperture has support for hierarchical keywords. I’d like to export this data to Expression Engine. Clearly the MetaWeblog API isn’t rich enough to accomplish this.

I have searched the wiki, documentation and forums and can’t find an API (such as SOAP, REST or XMLRPC-like) that I can call from a remote application. For the plug-in to work, I need to perform CRUD on categories and entries, as well as the ability to populate custom fields of both categories and entries.

Here is what I considered and tried: Executing MySQL statements from my plug-in. It isn’t an option as the MySQL database is on a remote host.

Have the plug-in generate files (like CSV) that we can import into MySQL. This isn’t an option too, because I need to update existing entries. For example, update the metadata of an existing photograph. It turned out to be to error prone.

Any ideas will be appreciated.

Werner