You are correct in having reservations about untrusted certs. The standard URL/Document steps will work with HTTPS just fine, if the server trusts the chain, however, it will fail if it doesn't.
In which case you will have to do some Java trickier to get it to work. I have only done this in testing, once, a long time ago. It did work, but I no longer have the notes. I recall googling for java, https, and invliad cert to find my answer.
