J2EE not ready for the enterprise ↩
Well, not really. But it's surprising how just about anything I've ever used gets i18n and especially Unicode support wrong, in some way or another.
After a lot of searching I just found out that you have to put "<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" %>" on every single JSP page to get the correct encoding, putting it in one include doesn't work. How annoying. Thanks go to Cagan.
I remember getting a working UTF-8 encoding with Cocoon and Dojo - argh!
http://cocoon.apache.org/2.2/1366_1_1.html