Answer of encoding  problem:

I think your problem is not database  connection. You must override reset() and validate() abstract methods  of your form bean as following:

public void reset(ActionMapping actionMapping, HttpServletRequest request) {

    try {

      request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");

    }

    catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {

      e.printStackTrace(); 

    }

    super.reset(actionMapping, request);   

  }



  public ActionErrors validate(ActionMapping actionMapping, HttpServletRequest request) {

    try {

      request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");

    } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {

      e.printStackTrace();  .

    }

    return super.validate(actionMapping, request);    //

  }