Yes. I do build completely Java projects with SBT just to keep myself sane (away from Ant, Ivy, Maven).

You need a basic understanding of Scala to write your build configuration though.

You'd have to learn a little Scala for the configuration language, but not much. It should work otherwise although I'm not sure if it can do everything Maven can.

sbt works fine with mixed java/scala projects. So I believe it should work fine with java only.