It'd help to see the stack trace and SLF4J output, here or as a gist. Before adding commons-logging it's possible SLF4J failed to get a logger and then logX() was called triggering the NoClassDefFoundError.
I don't know if the 1.6-based code will ru...
The alpha of hbase-spark you're using depends on Spark 1.6 -- see hbase-spark/pom.xml:L33 -- so you'll probably have to stick with 1.6 if you want to use that published jar.
For reasons I don't understand hbase-spark was removed in the last couple o...
