PHP is being used more and more as a tool for building e-commerce applications. A necessary part of most e-commerce applications is the ability to accept credit card payment in real-time, and PHP handles this facet of online shopping with ease --- with a little help.

This article will explain how to use PHP with Anacom. Anacom is a popular online credit card processor with a fairly friendly interface. You can read more about Anacom at http://www.anacom.com.

The first thing you will need to do is install curl. Curl is a little program that allows secure posting to web sites via the command line. This is necessary because PHP allows unencrypted socket connections but has no built-in functions for making encrypted connection (via SSL). This is where curl comes in. Curl can be obtained at http://curl.haxx.se. Note that OpenSSL (http://www.openssl.org) will also need to be installed for curl to post via SSL if no RPM or binary package of SSL-enabled curl is available for your platform. Curl can be installed anywhere and has been successfully tested on dedicated servers and virtual servers. Either ask your hosting provider to install curl with SSL or install it yourself. Documentation is readily available on the curl web site.