There is also an electrum daemon, that is be accessed with JSON over a port.
However, it has different commands (see stratum)
Great! I'm assuming that the daemon is the standalone portable version, correct? Electrum-2.0b2.exe or is it merchant.py?
Could you provide a link to the commands? or the .py file these commands are listed? I know stratum is a protocol used to expose services. I am familiar with the details of the stratum mining service as a protocol to transport mining information from bitcoind to a pool. ( I wrote a proxy)
Best thing I found (120 days old) was this -> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=110795.msg1833852#msg1833852 and actually, that looks like the stratum is used to talk to the Electrum server, not the client.
If you type electrum help, you'll see a list of API calls to the wallet.
You can do electrum listaddresses, then choose an address and do electrum setlabel 1MyAddr.. mylabel
I thought more about this, and I was wondering... when I do electrum listaddresses, does that require me to run that in the python development environment? i.e. on windows I will be doing "python electrum listaddresses", and if I built electrum into an executable, I would no longer have this functionality?
Really what I am after, is the functionality provided by the merchant.py. So, possibly what I am seeing is the best way for anyone to use Electrum as a service to their bitcoin application, is to create a plugin for Electrum that provides the interface.