Connection pooling, jdbc3 and encoding

Hi jdbc hackers,
(cc'ing Chris Holmes which is the really interested person, I'm just writing
this e-mail since I'm aware of the problem and I'm already subscribed
to the pgsql-jdbc list)

At the geoserver project we are struggling with issue related to encoding.
Basically we would need to:
* use the JDBC3 driver;
* manage a connection pool;
* set the connection encoding (but it seems to be working only with jdbc2?)
* change the encoding of an opened connection.

About the latest request, we need to serve data to clients in different
encodings (geoserver is a network server that usually works on the
internet), and the encoding is part of the client request (specifically,
the client specify a charset, but it is the same as encoding in postgresql
parlance, right?).
Now, we we extract a connection from the connection pool, we would need to
change its enconding to fullfill the client request...
The other options seems to be to handle a connection pool for each
encoding (and maybe lazily create the pools) or to re-encode things
at the client side...

What do you suggest?

Best regards
Andrea Aime