SSL support in Java

I’m making an XMLRPC server in Python that I need to access from a Java Servlet. But the default security manager is picky about allowing SSL certificates it does not trust (if you were in doubt: this is a good thing! ). The solution (based on this site was:

openssl x509 -in server.crt -out server.crt.der -outform der
keytool -keystore $JAVAHOME/jre/lib/security/cacerts -alias pySSL -import -file server.crt.der