Hubert Figuiere has released Exempi 1.99.3
An important addition in this release is the ability to serialize XMP to a string, making sidecar XMP possible. The soon-to-be-released Liblicense 0.1 already takes advantage of this feature; it uses Exempi to read and write licenses within XMP sidecar.
Hopefully, the API will soon stabilize in preparation for the 2.0 release.