Event Hubs via Java 7 in Storm

Hey all!  First post...

We are using Java 7 in Storm and the azure-eventhubs in Maven is only java 8.

We are currently using

<dependency>
<groupId>com.microsoft.eventhubs</groupId>
<artifactId>eventhubs-storm-spout</artifactId>
<version>0.10.0.2.3.3.1</version>
</dependency>

but this api is quite buggy.  Our connections get reset all the time and we have funky logic to get the connections.  I don't think it was really designed for writing to the event hub.

Any help?