In this new post to his blog Matt Curry suggests the use of a library in the CakePHP framework, HttpSocket library, over the more traditional cURL tool.

There are a few new Bakery articles lately that use cURL for remote calls (see here and here), rather then Cake's HttpSocket lib. This is probably because HttpSocket doesn't have a mention in the CookBook. [...] Here's a quick primer on using HttpSocket as an alternative.

He shows how the library can replace a ten line piece of code with a seven line (spaced out for the configuration) call to the HttpSocket class authenticating against the twitter API.