Ebean is a maven project so the standard maven commands apply. It should default to the jdk1.6 profile ... to compile against JDK6 (this is for jdbc api differences to JDK5 - we are dropping JDK5 support).
In terms of debugging ... you should be able to run each unit test by itself - you can run/debug them via an IDE which is how I do it. When you run a test by itself you can use code like: GlobalProperties.put("classes", BSimpleWithGen.class.toString()); ... to just register the entity classes you are interested in - which is probably what you want to do to debug the 'entity definition / parsing process'.
Hope that helps, Rob.