In the node, the tasks are deserialized before calling NodeLifeCycleListener.jobStarting(). A consequence of this is that, when a task has an explicit reference (e.g. via an "import" statement) to another class that is in a downloaded jar (see Extended Class Loading sample), this will cause a ClassNotFoundException at deserialization time.

We propose to add a notification method like jobHeaderLoaded(NodeLifeCycleEvent) and add a getTaskClassLoader() method to the event class. The new notification will be sent right after the job header (including the JobMetadata) is deserialized and before the tasks are deserialized. Also, to avoid breaking the API with regards to existing applications that use NodeLifeCycleListener, we would prefer to create a new interface that would extend it, e.g.:

public interface NodeLifeCycleListenerEx extends NodeLifeCycleListener {
  public void jobHeaderLoaded(NodeLifeCycleEvent event);
}

This would allow us to deprecate NodeLifeCycleListener in a first time, while keeping its functionality intact, then eventually remove it in a later version.