From Zend this morning, there is a new tutorial talking about integrating PHP and cURL together to create a "more powerful PHP".

This tutorial starts you off with the basics - what cURL is, what it can be used for and how to get it installed into your PHP instance. (Unfortunately, they opted for the 'easy way out', and show you how to install it on Windows.) Then, once you have it all installed and working, there is, of course, the test code they give you to ensure that you set it all up correctly.

Now, the real fun starts, and they dive right into a pretty complex series of scripts that show you how to simulate various kinds of requests with the cURL extension - POST, GET, HTTP Authentication, etc. There's also a brief mention of when you might want to use the libcurl (in PHP) or just use the command-line software to get the job done.

I personally used the libcurl for a project I worked on a while back where they required a secure socket connection to their server (with certs and everything). Now, thankfully, with OpenSSL compiled into PHP 4.3.0 (as soon as it's released), that won't be an issue anymore. Secure sockets for all!

Thanks to Ewald for the pointer...