How to mavenify a Play 2 application

This article is for developers who want to develop web-apps with Play 2 Framework but are required to integrate these new web-apps in an existing build process based on Maven.

Lucky you, someone already started a project to do this: play2-maven-plugin.
Unfortunately, this Maven plugin does not support hot reloading yet, which makes the development process painful.

To make it short, you still need SBT to enjoy Play 2 hot reloading feature... but you do not want to have to maintain both Maven and SBT configurations.
The trick is to configure SBT from Maven pom files with sbt-pom-reader.

This is how you need to configure your play2-maven project:

<my-maven-project>/
  pom.xml                  <- Your maven build
  build.sbt                <- the sbt Play 2 configuration
  project/
     build.properties      <- the sbt version specification
     build.scala           <- the sbt build definition
     plugins.sbt           <- the sbt plugin configuration

  ..                       <- Whatever files are normally in your maven project.

Each of the files should have the following contents.
pom.xml: @see play2-maven-plugin usage

build.sbt:

play.Project.playJavaSettings //or play.Project.playScalaSettings

project/build.properties:

sbt.version=0.13.0

project/build.scala:

object BuildFromMavenPomSettings extends com.typesafe.sbt.pom.PomBuild

project/plugins.sbt:

addSbtPlugin("com.typesafe.play" % "sbt-plugin" % "2.2.1")

addSbtPlugin("com.typesafe.sbt" % "sbt-pom-reader" % "1.0.1")

Now you can use Maven to build your Play 2 application and SBT to develop it with hot reloading. 

Happy coding!

Source: https://github.com/sbt/sbt/issues/1123