This section provides a quick introduction of character encoding in Java language and the JDK package provided by Sun Microsystems.
Character Encoding: A map scheme between code points of a code character
set and sequences of bytes.
Coded Character Set: A character set in which each character has an
assigned integral number.
Code Point: An integral number assigned to a character in a coded character set.
Unicode: A coded character set that contains all characters used
in the written languages of the world and special symbols.
As of 1.4.1, JDK supports Unicode 3.0, based on the information provided
in the reference document of java.lang.Character class.
I am not sure how future version of JDK is going to support Unicode 3.1,
because it now contains characters with code points greater than U+FFFF,
which is the maximum value of 'char' type in Java.
Because of the 'char' limitation, JDK 1.4.1 can only support encoding
and decoding code points in the 16-bit range: U+0000...U+FFFF.
