Java is a superb language. I have loved it ever since I wrote “Hello World” in it. My love for it increased even more when I put up a dialog of username and password using JDialog. Later I found Java has a big ecosystem on its own. Java SE, the core, Swing, Applet, Servlet, JSP, JSF, JMS, JavaMail, EJB and it continues. Each topic mentioned in the previous sentence can have a 500+ pages book.
I have had the experience of desktop development, delivered applications as a JAR to clients, but still one thing that I would love to have is “Installer for Java Desktop Application”. Yes I found lots of them, among them Izpack along with launch4J is a wonderful combination. NSIS, JSmooth, EXEWrapper and all others are wonderful on their own but they all have a high learning curve. For understanding NSIS, one need to understand the NSIS’s style of scripts and for Izpack you need to know it’s XML structure and compilation issues. Despite the availability of the Installers and all being open source I am not comfortable with those installers. Is it because they have a some learning curve or Is it because the installers like things should have been provided by the language itself. Offcourse if I will be needing one, I should design one but question on my mind (Like the one facebook asks 
me everytime ) is shouldn’t Oracle (previously SUN) have provided these things by default. What I found is beginners are having hell lots of problems with that. There are no good tutorials/blogs and official posts for any Installer related things from the company on it’s own. Why is that? In my opinion, introducing those things and having good articles/tutorials on these things would lure the beginners into Java world. These are the things that are not very convincing and because of these difficulties, many adapt the other. Why would a beginner trouble himself moving into Java if s/he can get easily with Visual Studio (Though there is Netbeans a java alternative for Visual Studio, I am a big fan of it ever since it’s 4.0 release) for example.
I wonder how Java/JavaSE7 installer itself is created. If you have the answer to this please write it in comments, I would love to see it. In my opinion, in an installer, basically there should be basic things like
- Serial Key Generation technique for unique installation.
- Prevention to the application if it’s copied to another device (it should be done by the application itself).
- Providing Demo version for lets say we can open 50 times the application for Demo purpose, after reaching this, we should ask the serial key and continue with full feature.
- Embedded DB installation, for making commercial application.
- And the validation for the user inputs during installation.
in an installer.
Netbeans Platform a very powerful rich client platform for JavaSE based on swing is a cool thing. I am going through it, but even though, it creates installers, there seems no tutorials/blogs for creating custom installer through Netbeans Platform 7.1. I would love to see this article if there are any (If you know, please share). Will let you know if I found any special during my research and study by utilizing my free time. Thank you for now. 