I spent half a day today trying to see why a the web start application created and deployed using a simple build script didn’t work after I’ve created a new certificate as our previous was about to expire.

First I suspected it was because I signed the application using SUN JDK 1.6, and it might have some compatibility issues (as if) then I suspected it was the IBM JDK 1.5’s ikeytool I used to create the key (NB. I’m lazy to learn the keytool paramers, so I prefer to use a GUI for creating keys)

It turned out I was presuming the keys use UTF internally, like most Java applications should, so when entering the locality I used “Vác” with accented characters. Neither ikeytool, neither keytool warned me about this. Once creating a new key without the accent the application started working straight away.

Since “Budapest” doesn’t have any special characters, I never noticed this, but I think it deserves to be mentioned, so others won’t run into this problem.