How does SSL work behind the scenes

Hello... I had to write a client to pull a file from a server with an HTTPS url ... I wrote a simple http client with authentication headers for userid and password.... It worked for me... I read about SSL and found out that HTTPS is not so simple as HTTP and a lot of authentication happens behind the scenes .... Since my program worked with an HTTP connection... I can not figure out who did the 'behind the scenes' job.... Since all HTTP requests go thru my company's proxy server, I guess it could be the proxy server who is doing the authentication.... I need this information because this program will run on someone else's network and I don't know if it will work for sure

HTTPS/SSL/TLS is standardized, so as long as all sides implement the standards correctly -which I would assume for something as common as HTTPS- there shouldn't be a problem. Have you encountered problems using HTTPS in your environments?

I don't have a problem in my environment..... But this program will run on my client's machine in the near future and I just want to know if there could be problems.... I want to know when I use an HttpURLConnection class to connect to a site with an https URL, who implements the SSL protocol from my side .... Thats the reason I suspect my HTTP proxy server of doing it

HttpUrlConnection supports HTTPS (it uses a javax.net.ssl.HttpsURLConnection object underneath). Any device or piece of software meant to handle web traffic better implement it as well, or it'd be pretty much useless.
[ September 30, 2008: Message edited by: Ulf Dittmer ]

Thats the information that i wanted [

]...... Thanks a ton