It’s possible to try out Silex interactively without building a project. You have two options: you can use spark-shell if you have Spark installed, or you can use sbt console from a checkout of the source repository.
You can run Silex under a Spark shell without explicitly downloading it. Here’s the invocation to make it work:
spark-shell --repositories https://dl.bintray.com/willb/maven/ --packages io.radanalytics:silex_2.11:0.2.2(Thanks to Jirka Kremser for this suggestion!)
If you’ve checked out the Silex repository, you can run sbt console and get an environment with Silex preloaded.
(In general, you can customize the behavior of sbt console.)