PHP question regarding Cold Fusion

Cold Fusion, as far as I'm concerned, stinks. However, I have been involved in porting a website from Cold Fusion to PHP and during this transmogrification, I've come across something I'm not sure how to emulate in PHP. Perhaps if there are any CF/PHP gurus out there, they can help me out. The tag I am talking about is <CFHTTP>. This tag allows you to emulate the posting of a form, but also allows you to capture the results of the post. There are a couple of forms written in CF that connect to the merchant account, check a credit card, for example, and then wait for the approval/denial response. Is there anything in PHP that can do this same kind of thing? Any help would be appreciated. Best regards, Jeremy Reed