Last week I spent a couple of days looking for an open source cross-platform installer that can dynamically download data (dependencies) from the web. I couldn’t find anything that suited my needs. 🙁 Subsequently, I’m creating an installer from scratch for KIND, an automatic verification tool for Lustre programs.

It’s a fun project, but I’m stuck using Java. I’m not a huge fan of Java when a GUI is required. I’m creating a GUI based installer. Thankfully, the NetBeans IDE supports drag and drop GUI development but looking at the auto-generated code-behind, which is mixed with developer code, looks horrible – it’s esoteric and verbose!