Getting difficulty of a coin without having to download the entire blockchain?

[Chrilleee]

I hope this forum is the correct for my question, else I hope it's being moved to its correct one.

I would like to know if there's any way in which I can check the difficulty (and hashrate if possible) of some coin, without having to download the entire blockchain for that coin? That is, I'm only interested in the last block of the coin, that holds the current status of the coin.
Is there any known way to do this? I don't count looking at some pool's status page or online blockchain explorers as being a solution.

[ChekaZ]

Blockexplorer.

[Chrilleee]

Blockexplorer.

Found this Abe 0.7: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=22785.0
But I don't think that is what I'm looking for, as it needs the blockchain to be downloaded:

...  You will need a copy of the block files (blk0001.dat, blk0002.dat, etc. in your Bitcoin directory or its blocks/ subdirectory). ...