Life In 19x19

Is there an place to find information about creating a client for one of the turn-based servers? I know many Web services have apis available. But can't see much beyond grabbing status. I know anDGS does it, and other apps. I'm curious as to how they pull that data.

For DGS, the latest specs for the API for client-access (quick-suite) can be found here:
http://sourceforge.net/p/dragongoserver/dgs-main/ci/master/tree/specs/quick_suite.txt?format=raw