Something to be aware of when switching the encoding to UTF-8 is that tomcat will need to be reconfigured also. The encoding of URL-parameters (for GET-requests) is still  interpreted as ISO-8859-1. You may want to set useBodyEncodingForURI="true" in the connector in use. See http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/config/ajp.html on what this does.