Frequently Asked Questions

What is Cranium?
Cranium is a web application that allows for easy monitoring of the memory consumption of your servlet container. Each memory pool is displayed in an easy to interpret form along with information on class loading, garbage collection and server configuration.
Why should I use Cranium?
Because I'll kill a kitten if you don't! There are numerous tools available for monitoring Java applications in general and for specific server implementations, but many of them require low level access to the machine or Java process which may not be appropriate/available to all members of a development team. Cranium exposes the most important memory and server information through a web app, making the information available to anyone with a browser and access to the web server. Cranium also includes some tools (such as the forced garbage collection) which are not widely available in other tools. Of course you still need to be careful not to allow unrestricted public access to Cranium itself as some of the tools available could easily be exploited to perform a denial of service attack.
What license is Cranium released under?
Cranium is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3. If you don't want to release any changes you have made to the application you will need a commercial license, contact me (through my blog which is detailed below)and I'm sure we can come to some agreement.
Where can I download the Cranium source code from?
Cranium is hosted in my SVN repository along with all my other open-source software. Feel free to browse the repository and download anything that takes your fancy! You can also monitor development progress via the Cranium project on my Jenkins server. An updated WAR file is also produced after every successful build if you fancy living on the bleeding edge!
Is there a twitter/Facebook page I can follow to keep up to date with developments?
I'm not really a social media person so I don't have an account with twitter of Facebook. I do, however, have a couple of blogs. One of them is dedicated to software issues (specifically software I write) and so you can follow progress on there under the Cranium label.
Where did the cool graphics and fonts come from?
I'm definitely not an artist so the graphics were sourced from a number of locations. The main logo is by David Lanham and is part of his Sticker 1 icon pack. The colour scheme was generated from the main logo using Color Hunter. The toolbar icons are all taken from the Tango Icon library. The non-standard font used for the title of each page, Special Elite, is loaded via the Google Font API and is by Astigmatic.