You can use sbt to build Scalate - its particularly well suited to rapid edit-compile-test cycles.
We use the maven pom.xml to describe dependencies between modules and to describe the various remote maven repositories used to download jars. The SBT build then uses the dependencies downloaded in your local maven repository. This saves us having to maintain duplicate information for dependency versions and repositories across both both the Maven and SBT builds.
One day it would be nice for SBT to just be able to parse the pom.xml and find that information for itself, so folks won't have to do a Maven build first. Until then you first need to perform a maven build as described here to download all the dependencies to your local maven repository before you can use SBT:
mvn install -Pdownload
The first time you run sbt you need to tell it to update its dependencies from the maven pom.xml files. So type
./sbt
update
You should now have the project loaded and the dependencies updated from the maven poms.
If you have not done so already, start a sbt shell
./sbt
To build things type
compile
To run the test cases
test
To sit in incremental mode, re-running all the test cases as you edit code
~ test
Or to just re-run failed test cases interactively
~ test-quick
If you want to experiment with a single test case, type
~ test-only *FooTest
Then as you edit source code, SBT will incrementally rebuild your code and on each successful build it will rerun the FooTest class (in whatever package it can find it).