Sorry if this has been asked before or is common knowledge. It's one of those questions for which it's hard to formulate good search criteria.

Suppose I am writing a server-side app - say in Perl, or a Java servlet - and I want it to access other sites; eg as an online code validator or a price-comparison site does. But the sites I want it to access use SSL - ie the info I want my app to gather is at https:// URLs.

Does any off-the-shelf solution, eg a library of routines etc, exist to help me do this? Suggestions/pointers please.

Many thanks

You can use cURL, http://curl.haxx.se/

I have used it for a lot of sites I have developed and it works fine, you can simple call the program using system execution functions/procedures. If you are going to use PHP you can compile it with cURL support so you dont have to use exec() or system() to call it.