You don't need to make any additional efforts - Play has hot-compile feature built-in.
Just while development use play ~run
command to start the application and ... work. It causes that changes are compiled as soon as possible (after detecting changes in file(s)).
Of course if you changing lot o files without saving and then you'll save all of them at once the compilation will take several seconds, but when saving often small changes (ie. consider using IDE with auto-save function) Play compiles them almost in the fly.