I've been in touch recently with Ann Maybury, who is creating a golf tournament roundrobin manager for senior citizens in Palm Desert, California. The application is created on the NetBeans Platform and looks as follows, very neat and professional:

Ann has been working on wrapping up the application for distribution and needs to include the JRE, since end users of the application don't necessarily have the JRE installed when they install the application.

Several blogs and articles are available for creating and customizing installers for NetBeans Platform applications, as well as for bundling the JRE and other resources, though there are some gaps and inccuracies in those documents. However, now there's a new official tutorial, for the first time:

http://platform.netbeans.org/tutorials/nbm-nbi.html

The above is focused on Ant builds and Windows, specifically, and doesn't cover Maven scenarios, for which there'll be a separate tutorial soon. Feedback on the above new tutorial is very welcome, as always.