[busterarm]

Having used just about every major framework under the sun and done some WordPress work professionally, repeatedly I find that the best tools for this all wrap curl. This pattern is not as atypical as someone else suggested here. We did this repeatedly in our WordPress development.

curl has the best (in general) performance and is the most robust, reliable, battle-tested connection library there is, full stop. And it's not just limited to HTTP.

Do I really want to take a gamble with my software stack against the millions of man hours that curl has been put through? I never understood the attitude people have against curl. Problems found are fixed quickly and way quicker than in anything else.

The only place where I have found this to not be true is in the Python community, for reasons I haven't quite understood yet.

curl handles high volume, is portable, is thread safe, has features no other competitor is approaching, supports IPv6, has a stable & mature API, is well documented. What more could you want from dependable software?