1 A method to configure an application server for XML applications, comprising: providing a delegation layer on an application server that is transparent to the XML applications, wherein at least one of the XML applications invokes one or more XML parsing operations; retrieving a local copy of a document type definition (DTD) file or a schema (XSD) file from a local cache of the application server; performing the one or more XML parsing operations based on the local copy; retrieving an updated copy of the DTD file or the XSD file from a remote application server if an error is detected during the one or more XML parsing operations based on the local copy; and performing the one or more XML parsing operations again based on the updated copy.