I&#x27;m curious, what parts of the Java ecosystem (other than simple stuff, or old stuff, or non-Java languages on the JVM) <i>don&#x27;t</i> involve thickets of XML tags? I have so little Java experience that it&#x27;s fallen off my résumé, so I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;m uninformed and would like to be more informed. But everything I&#x27;ve seen of actual, production Java development today heavily uses XML somehow, from Ant or Maven build files, to web.xml, to Spring dependency injection, to Android, to even Java Web Start.<p>Is there any serious part of the Java (Java, not Scala or Clojure) ecosystem that doesn&#x27;t involve XML at every corner?