The XMLRPC Method product provides support for remote procedure calls with the XML-RPC standard.
No longer do you need to write external methods to query a remote server. You can just create an XMLRPC Method and fill out a few fields.
XMLRPC was designed to look just like an external method, so programming with it is intuitive. Since XML-RPC can be slow, you can cache the results with the RAM Cache Manager. Just set the time-to-live appropiately.