From Zend Framework 1 to API Platform 4: Migration recipe 🇺🇸

Migrating a large, complex legacy application is never just a technical challenge, it’s a matter of finding the right equations between business constraints, team capacity, and long-term maintainability.

This talk is a real-world experience report of an ongoing migration from Zend Framework 1 to API Platform 4, Doctrine 3, Symfony 8, and PHP 8.5. A journey that involves turning unstructured payloads into proper REST APIs leveraging the principles of linked data, progressively migrating public endpoints without breaking consumers, and making the most of the latest framework features along the way.

We’ll cover the motivations behind such a migration, the constraints that shaped our approach, and the trade-offs we had to make. We’ll also share how AI tooling has become a practical ally in tackling tech debt and legacy code at scale - not as a silver bullet, but as a real productivity lever when used in the right context, like tackling 10 years of technical debt in less than 6 months.

Whether you’re maintaining a big ball of mud or planning your own migration path, this talk will give you concrete strategies and honest lessons learned from the trenches.