How is cURL related to web services?

Question

well...just about all I needed to say...lookie here, I'm a total noob in web programming so go easy on me..and oh...if ever it is...could you point me to a simple example? i've worked wiht cURL on a payment API (Authorize.net) but I can't seem to get the picture of how it applies to web services

Answer 1

cURL is a library used to retrieve remote URLs.

There are plenty of other ways to do this in PHP, for instance using file_get_contents() but cURL offers much more flexibility.

It doesn't do anything special with web services - all it does is request URLs. Depending on the type of service you're using you might want to look at the PEAR SOAP module, PHP's SOAP classes or PHP's XML-RPC functions.

Answer 2

you can use curl to fetch a url (usually with a post request), and use the data that was fetched in you application.

curl operates as a client or useragent, in much the same way as requesting data from a website would be done from a web browser.

if you are doing strictly get requests there are other simpler was then curl, but curl gives a lot more flexibility, such as reading headers, raw data, etc