Is there any simple Web API which returns album art as an image, just like the Google Static Map API (Google Static Map API? I have heard about Amazon's and Last.fm's APIs for this, but can't find any code for that (other than in web languages like PHP/Perl/Ruby etc). Moreover they are REST APIs. Any help would be appreciated.
Is there a simple URL(GET) queries or are there only REST/XML methods?
It shouldn't be very hard to do by hand. The last.fm api spec for Album.getInfo method is pretty straightforward and the fact that it is a REST api makes it even simpler. Just get the xml response from the server, parse it and get a url of the image. I wrote this code a while ago but it should still be working:
String request = "http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?method=" + method +
"&api_key="+apiKey;
request += "&artist=" + artist.replaceAll(" ", "%20");
if (method.equals("album.getinfo")) request += "&album=" + album.replaceAll(" ", "%20");
URL url = new URL(request);
InputStream is = url.openStream();
DocumentBuilder db = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder();
Document doc = db.parse(is);
NodeList nl = doc.getElementsByTagName("image");
for (int i = 0; i < nl.getLength(); i++) {
Node n = nl.item(i);
if (n.getAttributes().item(0).getNodeValue().equals(imageSize)) {
Node fc = n.getFirstChild();
if (fc == null) return null;
String imgUrl = fc.getNodeValue();
if (imgUrl.trim().length() == 0) return null;
return new ImageIcon(new URL(imgUrl));
}
}