Inserting emojis in MySql 5.6 DB using 5.1.32 connector

[Arati Rahalkar]

I am using mysql connector 5.1.32 jar to connect to DB through Jetty based dropwizard service. We want to support emojis in our tables and as such have been able to use the utf8mb4 encoding required by MySql 5.6. I am able to insert emoji characters using the mysql command line tool.
As specified at many places, I have been able to set character_set_server, character_set_database to utf8mb4 encoding and collation_server to utf8mb4_unicode_ci. I have also set character_set_client to utf8mb4.

I also tried setting the init_connect to execute the statement: set names utf8mb4;

However, when I try to insert the emoji string into DB using JDBI, it works (no error), but I see ??? instead of the actual characters.

Can anybody help?