On Wed, 28 May 2003, Paul Accosta wrote:

> I am using windows and the Visual Studio compiler. I am trying to
> incorporate support for SSL so that I can do posts to a https page. I have
> 2 questions about this.
>
> First it seems pretty complex to do this.

I don't think it is. It just just not documented much for Windows people.
When you've got it working, you can help us provide a better description...

> I have used libwww before and I was not required to use any cert or pem's.

If you don't (tell libcurl to) verify the server's cert, you cannot be sure
that you are communicating with the correct server. You may have chosen to
ignore that with libwww, but that choice is still present and you can ignore
security aspects with libcurl as well. The only difference is that libcurl
will force you to explicitly disable the security (since 7.10) instead of
vice versa.

See http://curl.haxx.se/docs/sslcerts.html

> Is there a way to communicate easily with https pages?

Yes, disable the verification and it works the same way as with your regular
HTTP pages.

> Also I can not find any instructions on how to include SSL support for
> windows. Is openssl built in or do I need to specify something else?

If you build libcurl from the command line, run 'nmake vc-ssl' and you should
have yourself an SLL-enabled library built.

If you for any weird reason decide to build libcurl from within the MS IDE,
then bring up the lib/Makefile.vc6 makefile and copy the proper set of /D and
/I option and insert them in the compiler command line somewhere.

(Sorry, I'm not using windows and I've never even attempted one of the above
operations on my own.)

-- 
 Daniel Stenberg -- curl: been grokking URLs since 1998
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