I've been developing a Play app in IntelliJ for the past year. When run in development mode ($ activator run) it recompiles only the necessary files when you make a change, save, and reload the page in the web browser. I can even switch branches to another developer's work and don't have to restart the server. I'm not sure what you're talking about. Maybe you have something set up incorrectly.
SBT and Play work together great and activator run recompiles incrementally, this setup is OK.
The issue is with IntelliJ -- when I want to run Play app from IntelliJ, not from command prompt, to get easier debug support when running the app or junit tests. Running tests from IntelliJ is more convenient than using activator shell.
Yes, I could provide -jvm-debug flag to the activator command line but this works only when fork:=false, which can't be always used.
