[rockemsockem]

I've only ever developed Java at places that had their own infrastructure for everything, so this question may sound uninformed, but isn't Maven still the de-facto package manager used for most Java applications and isn't Maven configured with XML?

[kaba0]

Well, while maven be a bit bigger, gradle has plenty of users as well, which uses groovy or kotlin for configuration.

[synthc]

Yes Maven uses XML.

[tannhaeuser]

Yes it's using XML for all the wrong reasons - as a config and even scripting format (hello ant plugin) when XML is for markup/text. Fscking Maven doesn't even allow basic XML/SGML features such as entities/text macros. And yes Maven's pom.xml is used for package metadata on maven-central and elsewhere even if you don't use Maven directly.

BUT I have to say, every project using gradle as alternative so far has receded into bizarre ad-hoc deployment scripting. Maybe that's just because gradle can do stuff that was hidden away in jenkins build files, but still ...