I can understand the feeling. I think in the new Spring framework configurations are written in Java. I think this is from version 4.0. So that will solve your XML issues. However, I do make the assumption that you have control over what version of Spring you use. I think there is a problem with the documentation of Spring Boot when it comes to config code since you have a lot of stuff with XML but not so much with the modern Java based stuff. However you can try to learn how to map the XML to Java, you only need a few things to learn that mapping not the full XML configuration knowledge.