Remote Service to query available extensions?

Hi,

I'm not sure is this exactly qualifies as an issue but it was a suggested route from the IRC channel that seemed reasonable enough. Drupal rocks. I love working with it -- EXCEPT -- the tooling I find for developers is a bit on teh weak side. I am actually trained as a Java Developer and beleive so strongly in teh Drupal approach that I have decided to build out a series of Eclipse Plugins that will make project setup, drupal extension and just general development easier to do. One of the modules I am workign on is a "module browser" that allows the user to basically do what they do on the Modules search and download page of drupal.org, BUT, from within eclipse. When they find one (or more) modules they want to include in their project they simply select them and the tool will download and unpack them in the right place for their project.

Now the challenge I have is that so far I have only found a way to get to the conten by scraping it. There are so many of these modules that it actually requires me to use a complex data structure jsut to make it performant.. but that model can also become out of date quite quickly.

What I am looking for is a external interface (something as simple as REST would suffice) that will allow me to query the site for a list of modules (theme, etc) that match the users criteria -- just like this page http://drupal.org/project/modules.

Can you tell me if something like this exists already (I think not since I have not found it yet) and where I can find it? if it does not exist, I am wondering if it would be possible to have something like this added?