HTTP Retriever can be used to access Web servers using the HTTP protocol.

HTTP Retriever supports:
- HTTP specification version 1.1
- Submit HTTP requests of method GET, POST or custom
- Access sites via SSL using PHP OpenSSL extension or CURL
- HTTP basic authentication
- Handle redirection automatically
- Cache retrieved pages for a given period
- Invoke callback functions during the connection progress
Provides a pure-PHP implementation of an HTTP v1.1 client, including supportfor chunked transfer encoding and user agent spoofing. Both GET and POST requests are supported.

HTTP Retriever can be used in place of something like CURL or WGET for HTTP requests.Native SSL (HTTPS) requests are also supported if the OpenSSL extension is installed under PHP v4.3.0 or greater.

If native SSL support is not available, the class will also check for theCURL extension; if it's installed, it will transparently be used for SSL (HTTPS) requests.

If neither native SSL support nor the CURL extension are available, andlibcurlemu (a CURL emulation library available from our web site) is found, the class will also check for the CURL console binary (usually in /usr/bin/curl); if it's installed, it will transparently be used for SSL requests.

In short, if it's possible to make an HTTP/HTTPS request from your server, this class can most likely do it.