When cloud services became the ubiquitous way to install desktop software, classic GUI installers became almost obsolete. Cloud package repositories or stores can be much more convenient to install and, in the first place, update the desktop application.

At the same time, GUI installers are still widely used for various free and commercial applications. Especially for cross-platform applications, GUI installers should show the same behavior on all supported platforms despite not being fully native on those platforms. Some applications require complex environment changes at the time of installation, for example, registering themselves as Windows services or setting environment variables.

In this recipe, we will prepare a cross-platform installer for OpenJDK that will work on all supported platforms (Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X). We will use a popular open-source installation tool, IzPack, written in Java.