Schema Validation - s4s-elt-character: Non-whitespace characters are not allowed in schema elements

The problem was that the hazelcast schema version mentioned in the applicationContext.xml "http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.0.xsd" was different than the actual jar I was using, I think mine was 2.4 , so changing it to "http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.4.xsd" solved the problem. The explanation is that spring is first searching the xsds in the jars and then on internet.