Yes that would be possible - sorry didn't mean to leave that out of option 1. To be honest in the time available it would improve our bottle neck, but not get rid of it.

Option 2 would certainly produce the fastest development setup.

I have realised that in trying not to cloud the decision by telling everyone what the tech was, I may have done you all a disservice by not giving enough information!

So here it is: The existing tech is Adobe Flex. Provides great RIA, but not good for iPhone/iPad. It makes up only the front end of the app, with everything else php based.

The new tech would be to re-write the front end in HTML/JS, leaving the backend php as is.

So another reason for rewriting the code is that we will likely want to dump flex at some point.