East Asian Language in JSP

[Joseph Kim]

Hello. I am still a bit new to JSP's and J2EE technology.
I have built a simple web site http://www.ktmdi.com
which I was hosting on my own computer on Orion server until now. I just bought a shared JVM hosting plan from www.dailyrazor.com (their service is terrible by the way. no phone support and they only provide tech support over email..) and uploaded all files hoping everything would be fine and dandy.

It turns out that no matter what I do the Korean fonts that gets retrieved from MySQL database are broken up and cannot be displayed. On my own server, the OS was Win XP Pro on Orion server and I had installed the support for East Asian Font in control panel -> language options.
I had set the charset for JSP page to euc-kr and MySQL for utf-8. Everything worked fine on my own server.

DailyRazor uses linux based OS and when I emailed them to explain the situation and to ask whether they had support for East Asian language on their machine, they said it's not a server side issue and I should research on (which I tried before emailing them) this issue to come up with my own solution...

How can the same exact files work on my server but not on theirs? If anyone experienced similar problem and can help lead me in right direction I would appreciate it.

Also, are there any other Java Hosting companies that anyone can recommend? I just bought the service from dailyrazor yesterday and I'm already starting to think their service is crap. I don't mind paying for the hosting plan but I wish they would provide a phone support since I am not that familiar with all these server side issues.

[Christophe Verré]

Did you upload you files using ftp ?
If so, did you upload them using binary mode or text mode ?

[Joseph Kim]

What I did was (the only way I know how to ftp without using their cpanel interface) I added the ftp connection to "My Network Places" and then just copy & pasted all files.
But all image / flash files show correctly on the web page so I don't think uploading the files as binary or text is an issue.
Problem is that when users type their post in the forum, some of them will use Korean font. But when the JSP pages retrieve the Korean fonts from DB they are all broken up even though I set the charset on the JSP page to euc-kr. If anyone is familiar with this issue please help. =(

[Christophe Verré]

Ok. You'll have to check first that the data in your DB is not already broken.

[Joseph Kim]

I am pretty sure the Data in DB is not broken. Have you ever designed a website with East Asian language? How is your website set up? Can you tell me the whole process of how it can be done then maybe I can follow your setup to see if it works?

Thanks

[Christophe Verré]

I've already used Japanese(2 bytes) systems with EUC of SJIS.
No problem like this.
At least, you have to make :
1. That the encoding of the data you write is the same as the one of the DB server
2. That the encoding you use for reading is the same
3. That the encoding used on the web page if the same that the data you write (setContentType(), <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=euc-jp"> and so on)

There must be a wrong encoding setting somewhere.
You could try to output the data you read from the DB, into a log file. And then check that the data in the log file displays correctly. If it does, the problem is not when you read the data, but when you display it.

Do you actually convert utf-8 into euc-kr ?

[Dorin White]

Joseph,

It will be helpful if you can tell the forum exactly what makes DailyRazor's service terrible - simply not offering phone support doesn't not make our service terrible as you were aware of this before signing up.

I was reviewing your ticket open with our technical support team and observed the following facts:

1. The average response time to your inquiries was about 20 minutes.

2. Our technical support was very helpful and went beyond their call of duty to modify your code and get your application working.

3. You were very grateful for their help - if I may quote you said "Thanks so much. This was exactly what I needed to know. Your help is appreciated."

4. The communication was very cordial with you. Infact, all through your communication with our support team, you written words showed appreciation for their help - since you "are new to this and have no clue".

5. You had problems with creating directories under Tomcat's home dir which our team recommended that this is due to your Shared Tomcat environment and advised you to get Private Tomcat server running on a Private JVM.

6. As the Korean character problem, we set default MySQL charset to UTF-8 for you and recommended you read Tomcat and Java documentation on how to accomplish your needs.

So please before publicly denouncing our service, it will help helpful to all forumites to know exactly what the problem was. Our mission is to provide you with the environment to run your Java web application - we do not write customers' codes for them.

You're still under our 30 days money back guarantee - you can always cancel and try another Java hosting service to see the difference for yourself.

Goodluck.


Dorian.

[Bear Bibeault]

Take it offline guys.