SBT is the ultimate Scala solution for building and packing Scala applications. SBT has lots of plugins, such as Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA projects generation, which help a great deal when we are doing Scala development. SBT is built in Scala in order to help you build your Scala applications. However, SBT can still be used to build Java applications if you wish.
The core features of SBT are as follows:
Scala-based build definition
Incremental compilation
Continuous compilation and testing
Great support for testing libraries such as ScalaCheck, Specs, ScalaTest, and JUnit
REPL integration
Parallel Task execution
We will use SBT with the Typesafe Activator to Bootstrap our application later in this very chapter. Before doing so, we will play with SBT to learn the key concepts of setting up a build project for a Scala application. In this book, we will be using SBT version 0.13.11.