validating HTTPS certificates?

[Andras.Horvath at cern.ch]

Hi,

(disclaimer: this might be a FAQ entry somewhere but I honestly did use
Google)

I'm in the process of picking a language for a client application that
accesses a HTTPS (actually SOAP) server.  This would be easy enough in
Python, but I came across a strange fact: neither httplib nor urllib
offer the possibility to actually verify the server's certificate.

After some digging I've found that from 2.6 onward, the ssl module
offers such functionality but it's not trivial, at least for me, to glue
that to the HTTP protocol modules (and then those to the SOAP module).

Did I miss something? If not, is this feature foreseen, e.g. the trivial
build-up of a HTTPS connection while verifying the certificate chain? 

thanks,

Andras