Link to Photoshop libraries from standalone application

Hi all:

New to the Photoshop SDK; I'm currently wondering if it's possible to write a standalone application that makes use of Photoshop functionality to read/modify PSD files without having to launch Photoshop itself, by linking to Photoshop libraries that provide this functionality. I'm trying to run batch operations on PSD files without having to block an active Photoshop session and possibly run these operations on the farm as well, so that we don't waste time for our end-users when trying to process layer compss for large PSDs. I took a quick peek around the SDK but the documentation seems pretty stale; I wanted to see if this was already possible? I know there's some stuff out there about controlling Photoshop through win32com in Python but that still relies on an active Photoshop session being open, which would not solve the problem here.

Thanks!