The Java runtime library supports validation. Last time I checked this was the Apache Xerces parser under the covers. You should probably use a javax.xml.validation.Validator.

import javax.xml.XMLConstants;
import javax.xml.transform.Source;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamSource;
import javax.xml.validation.*;
import java.net.URL;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;
//import java.io.File; // if you use File
import java.io.IOException;
...
URL schemaFile = new URL("http://host:port/filename.xsd");
// webapp example xsd: 
// URL schemaFile = new URL("http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd");
// local file example:
// File schemaFile = new File("/location/to/localfile.xsd"); // etc.
Source xmlFile = new StreamSource(new File("web.xml"));
SchemaFactory schemaFactory = SchemaFactory
    .newInstance(XMLConstants.W3C_XML_SCHEMA_NS_URI);
try {
  Schema schema = schemaFactory.newSchema(schemaFile);
  Validator validator = schema.newValidator();
  validator.validate(xmlFile);
  System.out.println(xmlFile.getSystemId() + " is valid");
} catch (SAXException e) {
  System.out.println(xmlFile.getSystemId() + " is NOT valid reason:" + e);
} catch (IOException e) {}

The schema factory constant is the string http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema which defines XSDs. The above code validates a WAR deployment descriptor against the URL http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd but you could just as easily validate against a local file.

You should not use the DOMParser to validate a document (unless your goal is to create a document object model anyway). This will start creating DOM objects as it parses the document - wasteful if you aren't going to use them.

You can check if an XML document is well-formed using the following code:

DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
factory.setValidating(false);
factory.setNamespaceAware(true);

DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();

builder.setErrorHandler(new SimpleErrorHandler());    
// the "parse" method also validates XML, will throw an exception if misformatted
Document document = builder.parse(new InputSource("document.xml"));

The SimpleErrorHandler class referred to in the above code is as follows:

public class SimpleErrorHandler implements ErrorHandler {
    public void warning(SAXParseException e) throws SAXException {
        System.out.println(e.getMessage());
    }

    public void error(SAXParseException e) throws SAXException {
        System.out.println(e.getMessage());
    }

    public void fatalError(SAXParseException e) throws SAXException {
        System.out.println(e.getMessage());
    }
}

This came from this website, which provides various methods for validating XML with Java. Note also that this method loads an entire DOM tree into memory, see comments for alternatives if you want to save on RAM.