title: Making HTTP request with Django and deserializing output
body: <p>So I'm almost totally new to web development as a whole, but have been thrown into a side project using Django to pull and parse data from a web service, and am struggling to understand exactly how things work, even while looking through the Django documentation.</p>
  
  <p>In Django, I have everything set up and working at a basic level (using templates, a page is displayed saying "Hello World").</p>
  
  <p>Now in order to pull the data from the webservice, I need to make a request to a URL of the following format:</p>
  
  <pre><code>http://wbsapi.withings.net/[service_name]?action=[action_name]&amp;[parameters]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In the provided PHP example, they do this using cURL, and then json_decode.</p>
  
  <p>What would I do to get similar functionality out of Django? Thanks in advance!</p>