[vessenes]

It was a business intelligence app; the front end rendered graphs and charts based on data over Zend.

We staged out of that architecture by implementing a REST endpoint on top of Zend, and moved our graphing over to the (now-superceded) protovis library.

Our engineers weren't used to worrying about data transfer, so we had to do a little bit of engineering work on the JSON side once we switched out, but the graphs, charts and rendering are VASTLY faster.

That said, it could well be the Flex runtime that added all the badness; flash games definitely render faster than our app did.