My previous article on migrating the Spring Petclinic Rest project to Helidon (see here) received a lot of positive feedback, which encouraged me to explore this area further.

The manual conversion process, while feasible, is time-consuming and requires careful attention to detail. However, it’s often more technical than creative—tedious, in other words. Automating this process would save time and reduce errors. While simple rule-based approaches (e.g., replacing <some Spring annotation> with <Helidon annotation>) can handle basic cases, they fall short for more complex conversions, such as transforming Spring REST Controllers to JAX-RS. This is where AI can help.

In this article, I’ll explain the approaches I took, the challenges I faced, and the results (spoiler alert: the results are very positive). I’ll start with a test project I created for the conversion.