self signed certs and JSSE exceptions 
been working on SOAP/REST web services at work here and ran into the old self signed cert issue wrt JSSE. Most browsers give you the ability to add a self-signed cert to your list of trusted certs so that you can proceed beyond the SSL handshake. That's a little hard to do with command line sample java apps .. until I found this little gem which lets you import the self-signed cert as a valid CA cert thus creating a chain of trust which validates the cert:
http://blogs.sun.com/andreas/entry/no_more_unable_to_find