anonymous wrote : You can still use your mechanism, | but then the demand must have whenRequired before or equal PreInstall. I've modified the EsbDeployer and we now set the demands like this: | bmdBuilder.addDemand(objectName.toString(), ControllerState.PRE_INSTALL, ControllerState.INSTALLED, null); | What I think I'm saying here is that this deployment demands objectName.toString(), and it requires that when this deploment is at the PRE_INSTALL stage, that objectName().toString() is INSTALLED. Have I understood that correctly? I'm getting the same error with the above code but it might not be correct. If I look at the classloader used in ClassUtil.forName, the thread context classloader is first used to try to locate the resource: final ClassLoader threadClassLoader = Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader() ; | The classloader returned is : BaseClassLoader@215548{vfszip:/opt/jboss/as/jboss-5.0.1.GA/server/default/deploy/transformation-pojo-quickstart.esb/} Since this is the deployment units classloader and the deployment has a demands on smooks.esb should it not be able to access and load the SmooksAction in smooks.esb/jbossesb-smooks.jar, which is in smook.esb. I'm not using any explicit classloading configuration here going with the "big ball of mud" option :) View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4226212#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...