What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I decided to see if I could get the AdoptOpenJDK 11, now called Temurin 11, going on my M1Max MacBook Pro. In the past, they have had the AdoptOpenJDK 11 on Homebrew, but it was Intel, and I didn't want to bring in Rosetta 2 for any Clojure work, so I was willing to wait. I read on Twitter from the Eclipse Foundation that they had placed Java 11 and 8 for Apple Silicon on Homebrew, so why not?

It turns out, it's not bad at all:

  $ brew tap homebrew/cask-versions
  $ brea install --cask temurin11

and it's ready to go. Then I can use my setjdk function to switch between JDK 11 and 17 on my laptop, which is nice when there are some issues I've had to deal with in the past. Don't know when I'll need this again.

Sadly, the architecture for JDK 8 is still Intel:

  $ brew info temurin8
  temurin8: 8,332,09
  https://adoptium.net/
  Not installed
  From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask-versions/blob/HEAD/Casks/temurin8.rb
  ==> Name
  Eclipse Temurin 8
  ==> Description
  JDK from the Eclipse Foundation (Adoptium)
  ==> Artifacts
  OpenJDK8U-jdk_x64_mac_hotspot_8u332b09.pkg (Pkg)

that last line is the kicker: x64... so it goes. Still... I have JDK 11 for Apple Silicon now, that's good. 🙂

I was doing a little Node/JS coding on play.js on my iPad Pro this week, and ran into a few issues that I wrote to the developers about. They weren't all that big a deal, save one:

• Logging is iffy - using Node/Express, their default is the debug logging package, and yet you can't see any of the log messages in the console in the app.
• Running nodemon doesn't reload on changes - it would be nice to have a way to auto-reload changes in the files - specifically because the editor is saving them.
• Exceptions aren't logged - if there's an uncaught exception, it's not logged/printed in the console at all. Just silence.

And it's really the last one that's the kicker... no way to see if there has been any exceptions... that's something that would make it very hard to find errors in the code.

They wrote back that there would be updates that were coming soon that would fix most of these, and that I should sign up for the CodeSandbox Beta program and look for the updates. Well... this morning, I saw that they had an update, and changed the name of the app on iPadOS to CodeSandbox. So I fired it up to see how things had changed.

There were lots of changes, but the key problems I was having haven't changed, and they have really moved it away from what I liked about it, and towards another style, with different goals. It's OK... it's their app, but it's not the direction I was hoping they were going.

So... it looks like I'll have to wait a little longer to see what comes up as a development platform for the iPad...