jlopez's sandbox: Dog Weather

The Dog Weather module is a custom module that was developed for the dogzville.com website, a social network for the dog-friendly community. It includes the ability to collect observed and forecast weather information from the noaa.gov website and present the information in either block or page format respectively. Observed weather from weather stations around the US and its territories are collected at the top of each hour and made available to site visitors based on their city, state or zip code. This information is merged with local sunrise and sunset times and provided through a custom graphical display. A three day weather forecast page is also made available to site visitors based on location using a real-time SOAP/XML request/caching facility.

• Makes use of longitude and latitude coordinates of zip code and nearest weather station to determine the closest weather station for more accurate weather information.
• Utilizes the noaa.gov SOAP interface to collect weather forecast information real-time.
• Provides caching of real-time weather forecasts for quick retrieval of commonly viewed areas.

The module was developed around US zip codes but phase 2 will move in the direction of internationalization and provide administrators and users the ability to customize units of measure, weather elements for display, views, etc.