You don't actually need to do any of that. If you're writing Ant, I assume this was at least 10 years ago. Modern Spring Boot is all annotations and using an ORM is out of fashion. Maven can be a little complicated, but it's easy to work off an archetype and it's far more sophisticated than npm. Python doesn't have this problem, but it also just doesn't have these features as an option. You can certainly build a Java project with javac but we generally don't because Maven is better.