The BootUI family
BootUI is one of three projects by Julien Dubois that share a single Java workflow — from scaffolding an application, to observing it from the inside, to driving its build and run lifecycle from Copilot. Each owns one color in a shared circle of color:
| Color | Project | Role |
|---|---|---|
| 🟢 Green | BootUI (this site) | An in-app developer console served by the running Spring Boot or Quarkus app over /bootui/. |
| 🔵 Blue | Coffilot | A Copilot canvas extension that builds, tests, runs and debugs the app from the side panel. |
| 🟤 Terracotta | Dr JSkill | Generates a Spring Boot application to start from. |
How they work together
- Generate the app with Dr JSkill. Start from a freshly scaffolded Spring Boot 4 application instead of a blank directory, so the project layout, build, and dependencies are in place from the first commit.
- Add the BootUI starter. Drop in the BootUI starter to get a local-only, in-app developer console at
/bootui/, backed by its REST API at/bootui/api/**. It activates automatically in thedev/localprofiles and stays silent and disabled in production. - Drive build/run/test/debug from the Copilot side panel with Coffilot. Build, test, run, and debug the same app from the GitHub Copilot App's side panel, and let Coffilot read BootUI's endpoints to surface richer runtime insight without leaving your editor.
Where BootUI fits
BootUI is the project that observes the app from the inside. While it is active, the running Spring Boot application serves its own developer console — health, metrics, live memory, threads, startup timeline, configuration, beans, mappings, and advisor scans for architecture, Spring, security, Hibernate, REST API, JVM memory, GraalVM and CRaC readiness, and more. Every panel reuses the same controllers and immutable DTOs that back the loopback-only REST API at /bootui/api/**, so the data is already sanitized and secret-masked before it leaves the process.
That REST surface is also what lets Coffilot reach its richest tier. When Coffilot detects BootUI on a running app, it sources live JVM metrics from BootUI's sanitized DTOs (and shows a BootUI badge), and it adds a REST advisor-scan panel that runs BootUI's scans and hands the findings straight back to the agent for a fix-and-rescan loop. Both BootUI and Coffilot stay strictly loopback-only, so this richer integration never widens your app's exposure.