Myself, I use the cURL functions, because I have cURL installed, but you should be able to get by with the fsockopen() function; the difference is that with the latter you've got to build up the headers by hand.
Once you've made a socket connection to the Frontpage script, you can use the file functions to send it exactly what it would have received in the first place if the PHP script hadn't been there.
PHP would then pick up any resulting response from the Frontpage script.
Again, cURL internalises all this.