The only real prerequisite of the Maven Alfresco SDK Apache Maven 3.0.3+ installed (and properly configured) on your machine; neither an IDE nor web container or database are required.
Additional tips:
This SDK allows H2 embedded run of Alfresco (NOTE: this is an unsupported configuration for Alfresco Enterprise) leveraging the open source effort Alfresco H2 Support. This bridge allows to emulate Alfresco expected DB behavior and is therefore very specific to every Alfresco version.
Maven Alfresco SDK 1.1.0 uses version 1.5 of the Alfresco H2 Support. In case you experience issues with the embedded DB support, please check the H2 Support Compatibility matrix.
Alternatively, you can easily setup your DB access by defining POM properties