Hi Frederic, here is a sample how stax can be used to validate https://github.com/tdiesler/metadata/tree/staxval Please note, that woodstox delegates to jaxb to create the schema object. At first sight it is not obvious how to plug in the entity resolver into that processing step - so because of network access the test is terribly slow. A little research might show how to optimize this. Anyway, I think we decided to do the validation as an optional/additional processing step (i.e. not during the StAX parsing phase). In AS7 I get a DOM tree of the EE descriptor and validate that against a JAXP validator - after StAX processing is done. Also note, that the jaxp validator does not catch invalid element duplicates, which may be caused by the schema not being in sync with the spec (i.e you can't have multiple session-config elements in web.xml). This we handle hard coded in WebCommonMetaDataParser. cheers -thomas On 12/02/2011 12:38 PM, jean-frederic clere wrote: -- xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Thomas Diesler JBoss OSGi Lead JBoss, a division of Red Hat xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx