org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: Content is not allowed in prolog

Question

I have a Java based web service client connected to Java web service (implemented on the Axis1 framework).

I am getting following exception in my log file:

Answer 1

We had the same problem recently and it turned out to be the case of a bad URL and consequently a standard 403 HTTP response (which obviously isn't the valid XML the client was looking for). I'm going to share the detail in case someone within the same context run into this problem:

This was a Spring based web application in which a "JaxWsPortProxyFactoryBean" bean was configured to expose a proxy for a remote port.

The "END_POINT_BASE_URL" is an environment variable configured in "setenv.sh" of the Tomcat instance that hosts the web application. The content of the file is something like this:

export END_POINT_BASE_URL="http://localhost:9001/BusinessAppServices"
#export END_POINT_BASE_URL="http://localhost:8765/BusinessAppServices"

The missing ";" after each line caused the malformed URL and thus the bad response. That is, instead of "BusinessAppServices/OurService?wsdl" the URL had a CR before "/". "TCP/IP Monitor" was quite handy while troubleshooting the problem.