[mands]

Yep, I'm using JBoss as a catch-all for older "big-iron" style Application Servers - modern Jakarta EE (10 onwards) is much more slimmed down, and a solid option.

unsure re Maven, 4.0.0 has been around the corner for years, but I think there is space for a modern alternative that is JPMS first, supports semantic versioning (i.e. tilde/carat notation) with lockfiles, and doesn't require a bunch of plugins out of the box for common use-cases. Maybe Mill (https://mill-build.org) - i've yet to try it.

[cess11]

Mill looks kind of nice on the surface but I haven't seen it in action in any serious project. I suspect the flexible DSL might come with a maintenance burden.

XML is nice, if your pom.xml is massive, just suck it in through JAXB and program against it, perhaps render it to a web page. XSLT can also be helpful. We're not supposed to look at XML as plain text.