I am trying to use XmlUtil directly, as a utility. I was not using it via the BPM Engine. This is probably why the default implementation of org.w3c.dom.Node (i.e com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.dom.NodeImpl) gets used. I did use it successfully with jBPM 4.3
Alright, this makes things clearer. I believe the reason why your own Element instances return null to getLocalName is that the DocumentBuilder they were created with is not namespace aware. The jBPM Parser class always sets the namespaceAware property of its DocumentBuilderFactory instance to true. This is probably what your own app is missing.