MySql DB Conversion to UTF8

I am an experienced Java / database developer, but I have never gone through a conversion of a database from latin1 to UTF8.   I am using MySQL 5.0.27.  I am especially concerned because I am working with a live US site that I need to convert to be able to handle also Chinese and other languages.   The US site can't break.

The main piece for this question is how do I feel comfortable about the database changes?

So far what I have done so far is changed my my.cnf file to have the following information only:
[client]
default-character-set=utf8

[mysqld]
default-character-set=utf8
character_set_server=utf8
collation_server=utf8_general_ci
init_connect='SET collation_connection = utf8_general_ci'
init_connect='SET CHARACTER_SET utf8'
init_connect='SET NAMES utf8'

[mysql]
default-character-set=utf8

Now when I do:  show variables like "%character%";show variables like "%collation%";

I am getting the results of:

+--------------------------+--------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                    |
+--------------------------+--------------------------+
| character_set_client     | utf8                     |
| character_set_connection | utf8                     |
| character_set_database   | latin1                   |
| character_set_filesystem | binary                   |
| character_set_results    | utf8                     |
| character_set_server     | utf8                     |
| character_set_system     | utf8                     |
| character_sets_dir       | C:\mysql\share\charsets\ |
+--------------------------+--------------------------+
8 rows in set (0.06 sec)

+----------------------+-------------------+
| Variable_name        | Value             |
+----------------------+-------------------+
| collation_connection | utf8_general_ci   |
| collation_database   | latin1_swedish_ci |
| collation_server     | utf8_general_ci   |
+----------------------+-------------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Note that I am still seeing the two configuration items still being latin1 oriented.   Do I need to dump the database and recreated it?  Do I need to do a data conversion first?   If so what might that be?   Would ALTER database be enough?   Do I need to put UTF8 on all table creations in the future and database creations in the future?  Do I need to do something to make sure dumps work correctly in UTF8?

I realize from my Java Object Relational Bridge connection I need to also set the CONNECT=UTF8 or some such.   But is that all?

I am also using Lucene for search engine capabilities.  I assume Chinese with multi-byte might not work the same, but don't understand the full scope of that.  I think I might need to pull in a multi-byte parser.

If only one thing, I want to make sure I am using the database part right here.

I realize this is a difficult question, but thank you very much in advance for any help.  Until I feel comfortable, I don't make much useful progress and I don't want to destroy our production environment.

John
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