Introduction
PHP supports libcurl, a library created by Daniel Stenberg, that
allows you to connect and communicate to many different types of
servers with many different types of protocols. libcurl currently
supports the http, https, ftp, gopher, telnet, dict, file, and
ldap protocols. libcurl also supports HTTPS certificates, HTTP
POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading (this can also be done with PHP's
ftp extension), HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, and
user+password authentication.
These functions have been added in PHP 4.0.2.