There are a few new Bakery articles lately that use cURL for remote calls (see here and here), rather then Cake's HttpSocket lib. This is probably because HttpSocket doesn't have a mention in the CookBook (yet :)).

Here's a quick primer on using HttpSocket as an alternative. I'll re-write the code from the TwitterMail article as an example.

First, their original code:

$curl_twitter = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_twitter, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://twitter.com/account/verify_credentials.json');
curl_setopt($curl_twitter, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);
curl_setopt($curl_twitter, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($curl_twitter, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $this->data[$this->name]['twitter_username']
                                            .":".$this->data[$this->name]['twitter_password']);
curl_setopt($curl_twitter, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($curl_twitter, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$curl_result = curl_exec($curl_twitter);
curl_close($curl_twitter);

Now using HttpSocket instead:

App::import('Core', 'HttpSocket');
$HttpSocket = new HttpSocket();
$request = array('auth' => array('user' => $this->data[$this->name]['twitter_username'],
                                 'pass' => $this->data[$this->name]['twitter_password'],
                                 'method' => 'Basic'),
                 'uri' => 'http://twitter.com/account/verify_credentials.json');
$result = $HttpSocket->request($request);

I explicitly set the auth method to "Basic" here. This is because the default auth method is "basic" - notice the lowercase "b". Twitter doesn't like this. This is fixed in the trunk version of Cake, but if you're using the latest release (8004), you'll need to set it manually.

There you go. Nine cURL lines becomes four lines of Cake code. In addition the dependency on the cURL lib is removed as HttpSocket uses PHP's fsockopen. Cake's HttpSocket doesn't have all the features of cURL, but it's certainly handles most web services with no problem.