Using data from another website?

I am looking to write an external payment interface to my SQL-Ledger accounting system. The idea is that I can create a quote in the ledger and then the customer can log into the front-end system which will confirm the total price of the quote and allow them to enter credit card details (then redirected out to Protx to take the payment)

The question is how to extract the data from SQL-Ledger... For security reasons the frontend will be on a different machine, so essentially I need to make an HTML post and then parse back the HTML result

Any suggestions on the best way to approach this last problem in Rails? I guess the best place to put the code is in the model. Are there any tried and tested approaches to using Curl in a model and parsing the resulting response? Any example code kicking around?

Cheers

Ed W

Ed,

   > I need to .. parse back the HTML result

Try hpricot:    http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/

It's simple, efficient and under active development.

Alain