I am tasked with writing an authentication component for an open source JAVA app. We have an in-house authentication widget that uses https. I have some example php code that accesses the widget which uses cURL to handle the transfer. My question is whether or not there is a port of cURL to JAVA, or better yet, what base package will get me close enough to handle the task? Update : This is in a nutshell, the code I would like to replicate in JAVA: $cp = curl_init(); $my_url = "https://" . AUTH_SERVER . "/auth/authenticate.asp?pt1=$uname&pt2=$pass&pt4=full"; curl_setopt($cp, CURLOPT_URL, $my_url); curl_setopt($cp, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); $result = curl_exec($cp); curl_close($cp); Heath , I think you're on the right track, I think I'm going to end up using HttpsURLConnection and then picking out what I need from the response.