WWW::Curl is a thin binding on top of libcurl, to make using libcurl possible from Perl land. Because of this, the module is less like Perl and more like C in coding style. There is a new module, http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?WWW::Curl::Simple, which wraps this module into a more Perlish and userfriendly package. The standard Perl WWW module, LWP should probably be used in most cases to work with HTTP or FTP from Perl. However, there are some cases where LWP doesn't perform well. One is speed and the other is parallelism. WWW::Curl is much faster, uses much less CPU cycles and it's capable of non-blocking parallel requests. In some cases, for example when building a web crawler, cpu usage and parallel downloads are important considerations. It can be desirable to use WWW::Curl to do the heavy-lifting of a large number of downloads and wrap the resulting data into a Perl-friendly structure by HTTP::Response or use WWW::Curl::Simple to do that for you.
WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/WWW-Curl/
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