Working on some scala software in IDEA IntelliJ. (It also features Android if it is essential). Suppose I have two projects:
P1, written in scala, uses sbt as the build
Possibility three - define a multi module SBT project for both of your projects, and manage the java project also within sbt. This is a tedious solution, however, as you have to maintain two different build files, so this is only useful if you intend to switch whole hog to SBT.
Otherwise the "publishLocal" solution is probably the least painful.