Tibco and Certificates

I've been messing around for the past two weeks with certificate chains, different certificate libraries, and keystores in Tibco with a third party provider. Man, what a mess. To come into a project where nothing is documented about which certs are used and have more than half a dozen of them (legacy) littered here there and everywhere around the module, along with another 7 or so new ones isn't happiness.
Interesting things I've learned through this experience are:

• It turns out that there are compatibility issues with .p12 certificates between java 1.4 and java 1.5. I had a pkcs12 certificate that I could read and sign fine in java 1.5, and yet java 1.4 could not find the alias in the same certificate at all. Apparently, there are a couple of ways around this issue - I only got one of them to work. One way is to convert the .p12 certificate into a .pem cert, and then convert it back to .p12 (all of this with openssl). The .p12 certificate is supposed to be readable after the conversion from .pem, but that didn't work for me. I got some kind of invalid tag error. What did work for me was to use openssl to convert the .p12 cert into a .pem cert and change my java 1.4 code to deal with the .pem file. To do this I had to use a couple of jars in the globus library. I remember something about a BouncyCastle class. :-) Also, here's a link I found helpful to discover what kind of certs you are actually dealing with.
• Getting those new external jars to work in Tibco Designer's Tester was a bit of a trick. First I added them in tibco's jre/1.4.2/lib/ext directory. That enabled me to compile the java code in the palette java item. But when I went to run the tester, it said I had code I needed to compile !?! I then I found I also had to add them into the path property in the tibco/designer/5.2/bin/designer.tra file so that Tibco's Tester would compile the code.
  
• Trying to load the module into production, I ran into two exceptions in the Tibco adminstrator tool. One was an OutOfMemoryError. This was resolved by doubling the java heap property found in the tibco/administrator/5.2/bin/tibcoadmin-.tra file, and also doubling the values for the min/max heap size for the module, found under the module itself in the administrator GUI. The second exception was a InputStream cut off IO error. This was because my module was too big. I was referencing java libraries that we already had referenced in a 'SharedResources' module we have. Getting rid of those drastically cut down the size of my module and it loaded fine after that.