Tomcat and UTF-8

There's quite a few threads and pages about utf and tomcat out there, some mentioning URIEncoding in the cofig, others talking about an encoding-filter... None of which worked for me, entering special characters (in this case: umlaute) into a textarea gave me cryptic characters in my jsf-bean!

As it turns out, when the encoding-filter was invoked, it was already too late to change the request-encoding, the request object was already accessed in my very own authenticator-valve, making every later change useless!

After figuring this out, it was no problem to fix that, obviously! And the next AuthenticRoast release will also feature this... :-)

What i dont get is: Why is this not the default-behaviour with tomcat? Everything in java is (close to) unicode, hwy not there, too? Or at least provide a config-optin, that will work for POSTed data and not just GETs (as URIEncoding does)...

So much for now!!
:-)