There's nothing better for Java, in my opinion. Even with the XML, your build files will be smaller and easier to understand and maintain. Ant was created for the express purpose of compiling Java projects, and it makes a lot of things very easy.
Put together a sample to show them. Doing so should only take an hour or two.
If you're doing C/C++ programming as well, investigate SCons. It's python, and the build files are Python scripts. The Java support isn't the greatest, however, so I'd still use Ant for that.