Intro

First, a couple observations about "installation":

1. Installers are little more than glorified scripts.
2. Providing an installer fulfills part of the follow-through for The Principle of "It Just Works!"
3. I have issues...

Issues

• Don't want to pay for commercial installers. Every project needs one which suggests that installer-like products are ripe for open source.
• Commercial installers are too complex for simple installs. I think this is a direct result of marketing driven software releases.
• The Open Source products that I found have NIH syndrome and look amateurish.

Itches Scratched

• I want to integrate through standard cross-platform mechanisms->Java, Web Start(JNLP) and Ant!
• I want to pull GUI code away from business code. XUL provides the GUI while AOP encapsulates component interaction with business code.
• I want the installer to look professional.
• I want the installer-developer "feedback cycle" to be as fast as possible. Script the GUI and the logic while the installer is running and have the changes display immediately.

Current Status

• The home page has absolutely no project documentation.
• The API is well documented, but it has no user documentation.
• Ant is not yet integrated (next on my task list).
• The installer-developer "feedback cycle" is not as short as I'd like it to be.
• Needs more unit tests (yes, I know, I should've been doing it diligently from the start)
• It works, in a very "alpha" sort of way
• Total effort expended about 80 hours!

If you'd like to participlate, https://install-delux.dev.java.net/servlets/ProjectMembershipRequest (membership with java.net required).

Resources

Check the project (well, the code anyway) at: https://install-delux.dev.java.net/

I have a crude demo at: http://www.daleasberry.com/code_library/judy/judy-install-example.html