I am getting the following error "org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: White spaces are required between publicId and systemId" This usually indicates you need a space in the Doctype in the DTD. I have an EJB application on IBM WAS 6.1 server using jdk 1.5. This code is custom code with a vendor app. Vendor app includes xml related jars such as axis.jar xalan.jar, xercesIMPL.jar, etc. They do not use SAX parser, but use DOM / JDOM. I do not do sny xml parsing in my code. Exception stack does not point to anything concrete.