It took me quite a while to find out that I can use getTaskObject to control classloading behavior. It seems the sole purpose of that method is just be able to get getTaskObject().getClass().getClassLoader(). In that case it would be much more natural (and self-descriptive), if Task simply had getTaskClassloader() instead, which should default to this.getClass().getClassLoader(), being overriden in AnnotatedTask (and my wrapper...) to use payload's classloader.