Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.
It is actually done from SharePoint designer. There is no coding required, but you do have to create the dataview web part from within that application. You would first create the data source as the web service, then just drag and drop it onto a page and change up the format the way you want it to look.
It is straight xslt if you want to code it and then package it in a solution package. Thats the only other thing I know of, or there are some 3rd party tools that let you build DVWPs without using SPD. Lightningtools.com has a web part that you can use for that.