Encoding headache

[Hussein Baghdadi]

Hi.
We are using Spring and Hibernate in our RIA.
Our MySQL 5 database is configured to handle UTF-8
A snippet from applicationContext.xml
[code]
<property name="hibernateProperties">
<props>
<prop key="hibernate.connection.charSet">UTF-8</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.show_sql">${hibernate.show_sql}</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.dialect">${hibernate.dialect}</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.format_sql">${hibernate.format_sql}</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.generate_statistics">${hibernate.generate_statistics}</prop>
</props>
</property>
</code]
But when sending Arabic characters to the servlet and trying to save them to the database,they got saved as strange symbols.
On the servlet, I tried every thing: URLDecoder, URLEncoder, setCharacterEncoding
Any ideas?
Spring 2.5
Hibernate 3.2
Ubuntu 7.10
JDK 6