Get the number of confirmations for an external address I'm building an application that tracks transactions between two points for multiple currencies, currently:
BTC, BQC, BTB, FTC, LTC, NMC, NVC, PPC, TRC, WDC &amp; YAC.

I need a way to check the number of confirmations for the latest transaction to a list of external addresses.  For BTC i discovered that i could do this (in a somewhat round about way) like so:
At start get the balance: http://blockexplorer.com/q/getreceivedbyaddress/ADDRESS/0
Then later i can check that again, specifying 1 confirmations. 
/q/getreceivedbyaddress/ADDRESS/1
and see if the balance has increased from the start point, if it has, i know a transaction that is 1 confirmation in has occured. then i can check:
/q/getreceivedbyaddress/ADDRESS/2 and so on and so forth.

This works fine.  But for all the other coins there is no blockexplorer.com, but there is what is most commonly used, bitcoin ABE.

In bitcoin abe you can do a similar call, for example:
http://bbq.cryptocoinexplorer.com/chain/BBQCoin/q/getreceivedbyaddress/ADDRESS
but from what i can tell bitcoin abe does not support the /N parameter at the end to specify the number of confirmations.

So now i am stuck.  I looked into running local instances of all the different coin deamons like bitcoind. But, although bitcoind has getreceivedbyaddress, bitcoind does not support this for external addresses.  Since i do not know the private keys of these addresses i cannot add them locally, and so bitcoind does not work for my purposes.

Since all the other altcoin clients are based on bitcoind, they all share the same problem as well.

Any help is greatly appreciated!
Looks like the functionality i am looking for is getting added to bitcoind.  Hopefully most of the devs responsible for their clones of bitcoin will update accordingly and eventually this functionality will be available for all cryptos.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2121

EDIT: Also see this pull: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2861

Hopefully it gets merged into master soon.