diff --git a/.travis.yml b/.travis.yml
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+#  Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
+#  contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
+#  this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
+#  The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
+#  (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
+#  the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
+#
+#      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
+#
+#  Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
+#  distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
+#  WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
+#  See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
+#  limitations under the License.
+
+# requiring sudo forces Travis to build in an environment with more RAM
+sudo: required
+language: java
+# speed up builds; don't use cache with default install step
+cache:
+  directories:
+    - $HOME/.m2
+install: echo NOOP Skipping pre-fetch of Maven dependencies
+jdk:
+  - openjdk8
+before_script:
+  - unset _JAVA_OPTIONS
+env:
+  - BUILD_ARGS="clean verify javadoc:jar"  # main build of unit tests and javadoc
+script:
+  - mvn $BUILD_ARGS