[Gimp-developer] Libgimp newbie development path

[s s]

I'm hoping to develop an application that leverages the Gimp's functionality, but uses its own GUI and some other libraries.  My ideal situation would be this:

- The user opens my application and the only reference to the Gimp that can be directly seen by them are Gimp licensing requirements, while my application would be using the Gimp behind the scenes for basic image manipulation handling.

My current idea is to develop a plugin for the Gimp which uses my GUI(not using GTK).  I'm basing this off of the Gimp pluggin development samples and tutorials available.  However, is this the correct path I should be taking?  Will I be able to start the pluggin from my app without having the user manually open it from the Gimp?  Finally, is there a better way to use libgimp so that I can just use Gimp functionality from my application without having to startup the full Gimp application and use a pluggin?