The org.apache.avro.io.BinaryEncoder is abstract, even in avro's trunk, so I'm not sure how that was supposed to work... I made a change so that it uses the factory to get a DirectBinaryEncoder instead. It compiles, but I haven't tested.
This is the pom I used to compile against avro 1.6.1

This depends on having azkaban-common, kafka-0.7.0, avro-1.6.1 and avro-mapred.1.6.1 in a local maven repo.