Joomla 2.5：从外部应用程序中查找已安装的Joomla版本

I'm hosting quite a lot of Joomla website that I made for my clients.

Because of the large number of websites, it's hard to keep track of all current Joomla versions as I update them whenever I need to make adjustments to one of the websites.

Is there a way to read the current Joomla version from my external PHP application?

I have full access of course via FTP and MySQL if needed.

There is a class called JVersion in libraries/cms/version/version.php which has the installed version and build.

Is there a way to readout the $RELEASE and $DEV_LEVEL; values outside the Joomla Framework?

Thanks in advance

EDIT:

Not sure how to read the version yet from my application in a passive way but for now I am using the code below to output the version within Joomla:

  jimport('joomla.version');
  $version = new JVersion();
  $joomlaVersion = $version->RELEASE.".".$version->DEV_LEVEL;