NTLM Authentication for Java http clients

I was working to provide NTLM authentication to a RSS aggregator plugin http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFEXT/RSS+aggregator+macro+plugin , in our implementation the rssaggregator needed to access rss feed from an IIS installed application within an AD intergrated setup, so our http request needed to go through NTLM authentication.
What I found out during this exercise is that if one [...]