Aspire, the product that I developed over the last few years while I was working with java, servlets, jsp and XML, is being used on some SBIR projects involving JetSpeed and a few other open source tools. I have got a call the other day indicating that one of the forms is not accepting Vietnamese input. They are getting invalid characters placed into the MySQL database. The usage is pretty straight-forward. The user will see a form in a browser and will proceed to type Vietnamese (copy/paste perhaps from a Vietnamese app). This form will then be submitted to the server. The server is expected to parse the form input into parameters. Mahaveer suggested that perhaps I should be using some kind of character encoding to retrieve the parameters.

when it comes to complicated things such as setting digital watches, programming vcrs, ordering a sub for your spouse (Who always has a very discriminating taste), ordering at a local McDonalds drive through, self checkouts at Home Depot, and ofcourse software, I am a minimalist. If something is not hampering my imagination and productivity I usually don't upgrade. To exaggerate and make a point, I would be quite happy with windows 95, Tomcat 1.x, Frontpage, Jbuilder 3 for developing server side java applications that run in any container while David prods me all the time to upgrade to XP and how wonderful it is. (you can tell I am relegated to the auto pilot windows world). Anyway having made the point I still compile Aspire with servlets 2.1 although the current release may be at 2.4. Not that I don't like the new stuff in this particular instance but I want to be as backward compatible as possible as long as it is not crippling my style :-). For the curious I did upgrade to XP because I needed a better photo printing software.

Any way back to the encoding issue. I don't remember seeing any encoding issues while trying to read form submission parameters before. I remember porting one of our web sites to Japanese with out any problem last year. Based on that assumption I have advised Mahaveer that it should not be a problem and servlets probably will figure out the necessary details to retrieve the parameters. Ofcourse I am proven wrong.