2 problems with 3.1: infinite reloading and wrong UTF-8 output

[Stefan van den Oord <so...@vda.nl>]

Dear Tomcat developers,

First, let me tell you all that I am a very enthousiastic Tomcat user. I
think it is a really great product.

I have been using Tomcat for a couple of months now, creating a pretty large
application. It only uses custom tags, not inline Java and the like. The
goal is to create a tag-based web application framework (for my company's
rather specific software).

I did this using Tomcat 3.0, and got everything to work the way I wanted.

This week I started installing the webserver on which our client will use
the application, and downloaded Tomcat 3.1 for that. After running a quick
test of the application, I discovered two problems that leave Tomcat 3.1
unusable to me, as it is.

The setup I use: A Linux server with Apache for the static pages and Tomcat
for the servlets and JSPs. Clients are both Netscape and Internet Explorer,
on both Macintosh and Wintel machines. The application is written from a
Model-View-Controller perspective, which means that there is an application
controller (a servlet) that redirects the requests to the right page.
Initially the start page of the application, later the application tells the
controller what the next page is.

1. Infinite automatic reloading
In Netscape Communicator 4.7 on the Mac (not NS4.0.8, not on Windows, not
IE), when I request the controller servlet (which redirects me to the start
page), this start page is infinitely reloaded by Netscape. Important detail
is that the page has a no-cache pragma. The behaviour can be simulated by
setting Netscape not to use that cache (check page every time instead of
once per session, in the preferences).


2. Incorrect UTF-8 output
My pages have UTF-8 encoding; this seemed the simplest way to output
database content, obtained via JDBC, preserving accent marks. After some
trial and error I got this working with all browsers. But to my surprise,
this did NOT work with IE4.5 on the Mac (only that one; IE5 does do it
correctly). At first I thought this to be a browser problem, but installing
Tomcat 3.0 again solved it...


Please let me know if you need more information.

Kind regards,

Stefan van den Oord


-- 
Stefan van den Oord
soord@vda.nl