SSL Submission

Hey all, I'm currently using Perl for one of my applications to make secure (SSL) form submissions to an outside server. Based on the response I get back from the server my application does different things. Unfortunately, this app is all in Perl and has outgrown it's original code and continues to grow. So I really want to re-write the application but I want to do it in PHP. Now for my problem. What functions or libraries or classes exist in PHP that are equivalent to the secure posts that I'm doing up above in Perl? I've heard that CURL will allow this but I haven't seen any evidence leading me to believe that it supports secure form submissions, just secure file requests. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Is this even feasible? Thanks, Toby