JDK 1.6 and Xerces?

Question

In my current project, we target a JDK 1.6 Runtime environment. For legacy rasons, Xerces JAR files are bundled in the application.

These are no longer needed right

Answer 1

Bundling an XML parser has not been necessary since 1.4 when JAXP was added to the JRE. You should use JAXP and not directly call Xerces. Internally, the JRE bundles and uses Xerces anyways (with a "com.sun" prefix).