cURL is the swiss army knife of URL requests. PHP's cURL extension is some of the best written code in the universe. |ff3333|~*cough cough*~| Can easily grok HTTP(S) %POST%, %GET%, %PUT%, %DELETE% Proxy Authentication (%Basic%, %NTLM%, %Digest%) Non blocking transfers on multiple sources Content Compression cURL is faster than Streams and Fopen wrappers