We can trim the dependencies somewhat by removing the cassandra-thrift (no longer needed anyway) commons-lang (with a couple of small code changes*) and jackson-mapper-asl from the pom. Also, we don't need the explicit log4j dependency as slf4j-log4j12 will bring it in transitively. 

* We can switch to use Guava's Joiner (pulled in via the java-driver dependency) in CA.createAndExecuteQuery & roll our own helper method to enumerate the consistency levels in CA.setConsistencyLevelWrite