cURL equivalent in JAVA
jsoup
The jsoup library fetches a URL as the first step in its HTML scraping and parsing duties.
Document doc = Jsoup.connect("http://en.wikipedia.org/").get();
Exception handling omitted:
HttpURLConnection con = (HttpURLConnection) new URL("https://www.example.com").openConnection();
con.setRequestMethod("POST");
con.getOutputStream().write("LOGIN".getBytes("UTF-8"));
con.getInputStream();
Try Apache Commons Net for network protocols. Free!
I'd use the Commons Http Client. There is a contrib class in the project that allows you to use ssl.
We're using it and it's working well.
Edit: Here's the SSL Guide