Question

Why you may be pulling your hairs off after getting locked in with a external toolkit like Brazos or Spark or Apex CV and trying to upgrade them ?

Answer 1

Third party toolkit vendors cater to multiple clients and if you are late in the upgrade process lot of desired and undersired changes accumulate which lead to a broken upgrade. If you are using the default version of the toolkit without customizations you are good but as usual a lot of customizations are done for the toolkits which lead to broken components. Also e.g. brazos changed the underlying libraries which also leads to issues, Performance is also affected in some applications which have a huge to render User Interface.

All these toolkits are building abstractions on top of the default core CV framework which leads to the code being heavily dependent on the toolkit methodology, if you have to switch from one toolkit to another or back to the base implementation, its a almost 75% rewrite of the whole application UI.

Answer 2

How is this different from any other toolkit, including the stock controls provided with IBM BPM?  All toolkits get upgraded, some more frequently than others.  The intention is to provide customers with the most stable and valuable controls around and stay current with user expectations and new capabilities.  Third-party toolkits tend to get updated more frequently because they have teams dedicated to improving them and fixing them.  The response time for support requests from IBM are usually much longer and drawn-out than external organizations.  That's not a shot at IBM - they have the entire BPM platform to look after.  The reason why external toolkits exist is because there is a demand for better controls and better support, and many companies filled that gap.