I wanted to use the CURL extension for PHP to create some sort of download manager and I was thinking if CURL allowed to implement these 2 features I'm thinking about:
1) Multiple connections or multi-part download just like a normal desktop applications download manager.
2) Constantly update on screen (text or graphical, doesn't matter) the download progress.
Does CURL for PHP allows any of this? If so, care to provide some hints?
The curl_multi_xyz() functions, like curl_multi_exec() allow you to process multiple requests at the same time. Also take a look at CURLOPT_RANGE if you want to download multiple segments of the same file in parallel.
And the callback functions you can set with CURLOPT_READFUNCTION and CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION would allow you to send some kind of progress data to the client.
Set an option for a cURL transfer : curl_setopt