curl is a powerful library available on different platforms - I use it on Linux debian . You can use it just to get http pages, or to post data and get a response from a server. HTTPS is available too. An example: curl -k --data @request.xml https://127.0.0.1/service posts the XML data contained by request.xml using a HTTPS connection (and ignoring invalid certificates, option ' -k ' - just for testing purposes). This is a more interesting usage: it's nice to get info from Twitter or even send messages ("update your status") with just a command line: Get status: curl http://twitter.com/users/show.xml?screen_name=giavac Send a message: curl -u user:password -d "status=describing how to use the Twitter API" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml To install curl on debian: apt-get install libcurl3 (install dependencies too, and I suggest to include libcurl3-gnutls-dev)