Thanks for the reply, good to know! I hadn't heard of Spring Boot and had forgotten about Gradle.

In case I wasn't clear - I wasn't trying to have any sort of "point," merely asking for the sake of learning what the Java world looks like. I think my experience with Java is pretty average for a non-Java developer, though (I took one class in college, and worked a few years on the client side at an enterprise software startup, where the server was J2EE, and had no particular influence on what stacks were used in both contexts). I certainly am not complaining about Maven, just relating the fact that it involves lots of XML.