In Joomla 1.0.x it was a bit difficult to parse a RSS feed file inside you component. If you wanted to do that you need to include either SimplePie or some other RSS parsing library inside your component.
This is not the difficult part, difficult part was that, it might conflict with some other component or module that might also be using the same library.
In Joomla 1.5 you don’t have to worry about this issue any more. It now includes SimplePie library in the framework itself.
To use the library that comes with Joomla all you need to do is
jimport('simplepie.simplepie');
this will include the SimplePie library in you component or module.
Afterwards you can just create a SimplePie object start and using all the functions. In case you don’t know, here is how you can do that
$feed=new SimplePie();
Neat and simple isn’t it?
PS based on this information I have created a simple module to display new 20 tweets for a particular event, which I will be sharing in next few days.