Wicked Cool PHP

Chapter 11. USING cURL TO INTERACT WITH WEB SERVICES

The Internet holds a lot of very useful data: UPS can tell you exactly how much it costs to ship a five-pound package from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Hartford, Connecticut. Authorize.net can tell you whether a customer has enough credit left on his debit card to buy a $60 book from your site. But in each case, you need to know how to ask for the information.

In order to find the information, the first thing you need is the cURL PHP library to handle the connection between your webserver and other webservers. The idea is to make your scripts act like clients, similar to the way web browsers work. ...