When your team moves a mature PHP application to Java, you gain stronger type safety, broader library support, and more predictable scaling. A PHP codebase built over the years with Laravel, Symfony, or Doctrine carries business rules in places that are not obvious, from Eloquent traits to XML mapping files, so a structurally similar Java port can compile cleanly and still behave differently.

This post shows how to turn PHP-to-Java migration from a one-time leap of faith into a measurable, repeatable process using Kiro. Kiro is an AI integrated development environment (IDE) that pairs an AI agent with your codebase to run multi-step engineering tasks with you in the loop. The approach centers on a reusable engine: a shared methodology, a mechanical discovery scanner, and an eight-phase workflow. This engine treats the original PHP application as the specification and refuses to declare the Java port correct until a parity harness verifies it.

You start with an open repository, so you can run the engine yourself rather than read about it. Everything the engine knows lives in a small set of skill files, and with those files, you can run the same methodology in more than one way.

Everything here is packaged as skill files: versioned Markdown capability packages that encode the migration methodology (php-to-java-migration) and the discovery scanner workflow (php-model-discovery). Because that knowledge lives in files rather than any one tool, you can run the same methodology in two ways.

Kiro brings an AI agent into your editor to drive a migration step by step.

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