> Maven is a nightmare to use, it's so complicated I would generally not use it.
The maven ecosystem is really nice compared to that of many other languages (e.g. python, javascript.) It's deep in terms of functionality, but for getting started (dependencies) it's not that complex. And a good IDE will take care of all of the boilerplate for you.
> Nothing works by default, you always have to include stuff here and there, write one or two xml files before anything would work,
I do share your dislike of enterprise Java development on the other hand. I worked a JBoss/Spring/Hibernate/Tomcat contract a while back; that thing was an unholy mess which took 4 minutes(!) to start up. However, there are much lighterweight frameworks out there; I'm currently building an app on angular -> dropwizard/guice/jdbi, which overall is quite elegant. No XML in sight (aside from the maven configs).
The maven ecosystem is really nice compared to that of many other languages (e.g. python, javascript.) It's deep in terms of functionality, but for getting started (dependencies) it's not that complex. And a good IDE will take care of all of the boilerplate for you.
> Nothing works by default, you always have to include stuff here and there, write one or two xml files before anything would work,
I do share your dislike of enterprise Java development on the other hand. I worked a JBoss/Spring/Hibernate/Tomcat contract a while back; that thing was an unholy mess which took 4 minutes(!) to start up. However, there are much lighterweight frameworks out there; I'm currently building an app on angular -> dropwizard/guice/jdbi, which overall is quite elegant. No XML in sight (aside from the maven configs).