You should have these tasks done to get mysql  UTF8 characterset to work:

- you should set  the table character  set to Unicode

- Set characterset parameter in you jdbc connection parameters to Unicode

- configure mysql to recognize Unicode through its main  config file (In linux it is at /etc/my.cfg may be it’s the same in Unix env)

- Add UTF8 as your jsp  file’s encoding through both jsp <%@page %> directive and HTML <meta> tags.

- Save your JSP files in UT8 encoding.

- In some browsers like IE the character encoding is not set when sending requests you should call the following method before any request.getParameter(…) call