Interesting. All this time I have a perception that Java app is slow as hell. What a terribly wrong assumption. Color me impressed.

There's a series of articles about how Java don't have to be slow XML-laden crap: http://blog.paralleluniverse.co/2014/05/01/modern-java/

While I don't necessarily agree with everything in it (like Gradle builds), it's interesting to look at.

If you don't like XML but don't want to switch to Gradle, you could use another language atop Maven: https://github.com/takari/polyglot-maven