Deep down in the core of Watson, along with tons of other Mac applications that connect to the Internet (Aizai, Spring, Konfabulator, Comictastic, Pod2Go, PodNews 3, Suck it Down , HenWen, PhotoStickies, MakingMusic, EarthLink TotalAccess 2004, devPush, iScrobbler, WuffCam, iConquer 2, pMpost, Dejal Simon, MailPictures, Babelizer, and probably more) is an open-source piece of Cocoa code called CURLHandle, which is itself a wrapper around the open-source library, curl, that handles connections to the Internet.
And today ... again, no kidding! ... I've released version 1.9 of CURLHandle. If there are any Cocoa developers who want to utilize curl's functionality, this may be of use to you. Of course, this class was originally built during Watson's development timeframe back in the days of Mac OS X 10.0, when Cocoa didn't provide enough for what Watson needed. Apple has since improved their story, so new software development can probably use Apple's toolkit rather than CURLHandle. Still, CURLHandle may have life in it yet....