We are developing several services over at Curse. One of which is the ability to grab data through our API. This kind of data could be item information, character profiles, etc.. Currently, the only methods supported (in relation to the database and sourcepeek users) are the character methods. They also only give basic information right now.
So, here is your chance to get your requests on the list. The current methods, and an overview of the project, can be found on http://services.curse.com/wiki/index/.
If you're interested in using this, just let me know here, or drop me a mail (dcramer@curse.com). We'll be happy to add (almost) any kind of information feed you would need. We want it to be a great solution for people to develop simple plug-in's for their forums, guild sites, or blogs.
well there should be a search by name function for items (for all languages), because many dkp systems and item link systems just call your search site and parse the resulting html site.
of cause there should be a function to get items by id. for the return values the app which calls your interface might pass a kind of template with placeholders for the item values (placeholders specified by api) as parameter and you just replace the placeholders with the values and return, I don't know if this opens any security holes...