In various parts of the Spring codebase where we interact through JAXP, there are ties to the Xerces implementation as available from Apache and as shipped with the JDK. In addition to serving as a StAX provider, Woodstox also provides an alternative SAX implementation which can be manually configured on the user side. We should aim to officially support a user-configured Woodstox SAX setup as an alternative to Xerces, not least of it all for performance reasons.