...hmmm.  I had some CD based projects that would
have an 'index.html' at the root that linked to
other pages, applets and resources in sub-directories.

For the Windows platform, I included a little .exe
program that automatically launched the index.html
in the default browser.  There were no *nix/Mac users
in these distributions, but given 'index.html' was
the only file at the CD root (besides the .exe),
..I hope they could guess what to do.

For a while, it worked quite well

But..  IE SP2 pretty much killed them.   :-(

I could never get the MS 'mark of the web' to coax
Internet Explorer into accepting this 'active content'
without user prompting, and by prompting the user,
but loading the applets in an unstrusted sandbox,
the entire thing would fail - I could find no way
to get the applet accepted as 'trusted' before it
was fully loaded..

I gave up in disgust.

Now I am at the stage where I agree with Monique's comment..
'I doubt it's the right tool for the job'

Though, ..one (sneaky) way to 'include' your Java
project on CD is to put an index.html* that links to a
JNLP on the internet.

* 'The software will require an internet connection
during installation'

;-)

What platforms automatically execute applications on a CD? Linux doesn't...