How to get live data from a service? In the UK our weather office provides a live weather data feed. I would like my Drupal site to retrieve data from this service.

I've read up on the XML-RPC API that is in Drupal 7 core. I've successfully built a Hello World! module that acts as a client, makes a call to a service, and successfully gets a response.

However, Drupal 7 is old and I'm wondering if I should be looking into a more 'modern' approach. I've read up on the Services module.

Can anyone advise me on what are currently the recommended ways to get data from a service into a Drupal 7 site.

I'm not looking for a weather module. This is an API learning exercise.

Thanks.
Thanks for the advice. The solution:

For example, to get a three-hourly five-day forecast for Dunkeswell Aerodrome:

  $base = 'http://datapoint.metoffice.gov.uk/public/data/';
  $resource = 'val/wxfcs/all/json/3840?res=3hourly';
  $api_key = '&amp;key=abcde12345abcde12345';
  $url = $base . $resource . $api_key;
  $response = drupal_http_request($url);
  $data = json_decode($response-&gt;data, TRUE);