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I want to create Custom Web Components and use them in variety of frameworks like Angular, React and vanilla Javascript.
My question is Should I use Polymer(or any other library) to create one or write down by extending "HTMLElement".
What are the differences.
If you want to develop Custom Elements with Polymer, and intergrate them with another framework, you'll need to understand internals of both the Polymer and the other framework(s) to make them work flawlessly together, especially for complex architecture. I guess it's a challenge.
Also, you'll have to deal with the versions and compatibility between different framework versions. For exemple, if you develop a component with Polymer v3, il will be difficult to integrate it with Polymer v2, especially in a cross-browser ecosystem.
Lastly, if you intend to distribute your Custom Elements, you can imagine the 2 constraints above will apply to the targeted developers too. As a React developer, I wouldn't like to have to import another (the Polymer) framework and polyfill to integrate some 3rd-party components.
For theses reasons I would recomment to design Vanilla Custom Elements in order to interact with a highest number of web frameworks.
The idea of web components is to modularize the web regardless of what framework you use.
The Polymer project promise the possibility to create web components, not to be a framework, so it should be possible to use it with any framework. More than that, I should be able to just download the elements from the element catalog and use it without the polymer library, just with the webcomponents.js.
I recognize that this is an ongoing project and most of browser's vendors are still developing the web components requirements, but what I'm concluding so far is that the Polymer is becoming a new framework as I cannot use their elements without the Polymer library and the use with framework as Angular 2 is not yet working well.
Is that a way to use web components in a real modular way without all the boilerplate that the Polymer suggest?
TL;DR;
Polymer does not break the modularity merely by the fact that it's required to use Web Components built with it. It is just a library, albeit opinionated, used to implement custom elements.
These elements are however still independent modules. All of Polymer stuff should be hidden inside a component and not interfere with the outside.
Long read
The idea of web components is to modularize the web regardless of what framework you use
In a sense, yes. Though Web Components target to modularize the DOM really. For general modularization, there are ES6 modules IMO.
The Polymer project promise the possibility to create web components, not to be a framework, so it should be possible to use it with any framework.
I'm not sure what you expect from Polymer and Web Components in general. The modularity of Web Components come from the fact that when used, they are just an ordinary part of the DOM tree. Any existing library can work with that. Any Web Component is just a HTML element and exposes a uniform interface: attributes and events. What Polymer does is add some niceties on top of that so that you can enjoy data-binding, simpler custom element declarations, simpler events API, styling polyfill, shady DOM and more.
It's a dependency like any other and should not stop you from using Polymer (or Bosonic, or x-tag, or basic-web-components) with any other web framework.
More than that, I should be able to just download the elements from the element catalog and use it without the polymer library, just with the webcomponents.js.
Where did you read that? Also, is it a problem that polymer.html is required for the components to work? You may get the same with other Web Components libraries.
I recognize that this is an ongoing project and most of browser's vendors are still developing the web components requirements.
I believe there is a need of clarification. The vendors implement the Web Components spec and where it isn't ready, webcomponents.js fill in the blanks. Just as I write above however, Polymer is a little bit more, because it gives you more than pure specs.
Is that a way to use web components in a real modular way without all the boilerplate that the Polymer suggest?
Not sure what is the bolierplate that you refer to, but yes, you can write Web Components in plain javascript (or in a minimal dependencies fashion) but you will lose some of the sugar that Web Components give you. It is just like arguing that one shouldn't use jQuery, because all that it does can be done without it.
I am developing single page application which can be used on all the devices Phone, tablets (using apache Cordova) and desktop. Initially I started with Angular2 since it has component based development model (for code reusability), two way databindng, separation of concerns, dependency injection and efficient DOM manipulation. After developing it for some time, I was frustrated mainly because it has a lot of learning curve, it requires lot of tooling support for development (nodejs, node lite development server, polyfills, systemjs, observables, typescripts etc.), obscure error messages, lack of adequate documentation (since it is in beta). Also one has to write lot of code to accomplish simple task such as setting the focus in the textbox.
Finally I decided to go with Jquery 2.0. Since Jquery is lacking templating support and two way data binding, I am using JSRender and JSViews. JSRender and JSView will help to reduce the amount of code that I need to write. I believe I certainly can write clean code if I separate logic for services and repositories into separate files even using Jquery. So question is
What benefits I am going to lose if I use combination of JQuery, JSRender and JSView over Angular2. I know dependency injection feature is one of them.
Any other popular library with minimum learning curve for templating and two way data binding which can be used with Jquery?
What benefits I am going to lose if I use combination of JQuery, JSRender and JSView over Angular2. I know dependency injection feature is one of them.
I guess you have answered it in the question. Although i am not aware of JSRender/JSView so i will not comment on it. jQuery is good for DOM and ajax based operation, as i have used it and i like it.
Any other popular library with minimum learning curve for templating and two way data binding which can be used with Jquery?
For this you can look into ReactJs. It does have minimum1 ← learning curve. These are some of the benefits of ReactJs:
Simple.
Declarative
Build Composable Components
Interactivity and Dynamic UIs
Multiple Components
Reusable Components
Transferring Props
Forms
Working With the Browser
Refs to Components
Tooling Integration
Add-Ons
12.1 Animation
12.2 Two-Way Binding Helpers
12.3 Test Utilities
12.4 Cloning Elements
12.5 Keyed Fragments
12.6 Immutability Helpers
12.7 PureRenderMixin
12.8 Performance Tools
12.9 Shallow Compare
You can get more details about these here.
1. This does have a learning curve but can't say min or max. That actually depends on author who is using this library.
I use the combination of jQuery + jsView in a production sites.I have worked with Angular and ReactJS and both require a lot of other files and libs and are over complicated. With jQuery + jsView you can simply do everything.
The question is in regard to AngularJS, BackboneJS, EmberJS and the other frameworks.
I have to translate a project from php to javascript and I have to decide, if I am going to use:
AngularJS
Polymer
A combination of them
I prefer using Polymer, because I like it.
Yet, I am missing (and correct me where I am wrong) the ability to make:
Views and link between them (like in Angualar)
Controllers
I know that the structure is up to me, on how to build my application, but it seems that angularjs has a well predefined structure for building mvc-applications.
Therefore I want to know: Is Polymer a substitute for Angular, if you want to build a well structured web application or is Polymer complementary library to be used along other existing frameworks?
EDIT 21.09.2014
No one really answered the question to my fullest satisfaction, therefore I marked it as not answered yet. Many say it just "DEPENDS". But no one is able to elaborate, on what exactly it depends.
On the complexity of the application? On the needs of the application? For what needs does Polymer fit and for which doesn't it fit? These are the answers I was looking for.
Some say it can be used as a frontend framework. Others say that is just a library and others say "Yes and No". Unfortunately rather confusing answers.
I wish there was an official answer to this, but I let you in on what my feeling is. I believe it is a substitute, but Polymer hasn't yet reached the structure, that other frameworks require to work. Maybe this is intentional, maybe it is just a matter of unreached maturity, because the framework is new.
I hope that the creators will explain, when it is best to use AngularJS and when should someone use Polymer for building large scalable web applications.
EDIT 15.08.2015
Polymer 1.0 is out. And it turns out Polymer is officially NOT a framework and is supposed to work in a complentary way with other frontend frameworks.
https://youtu.be/fD2As5RmM8Q?t=6m42s
IMHO both are two different things and they both are to serve two different purposes. Though they have some common features to offer, data-binding can be one of them.
Polymer
If you truly want to use the Awesome Webcomponents, Polymer is one way to achieve that. There are other options like you can go with your vanilla JS, or use other libraries like X-Tag from Mozilla or Bosonic. These libraries polyfill the webcomponent features which are still in drafted state. So, these libs help us have/provide the same user experience across browsers even where there is no native support for the webcomponents.
Angular
This is a full fledged MVC framework. And people here know what Angular as an MVC framework includes/provides.
That all said to answer your question
Google's Polymer is not exactly a fully functioning Frontend Framework and can be used as a Subsitute OR Complement to other Frontend Frameworks. It can be used as a substitution for the V part in Angular as MVC. Like people use React as V in different frameworks. It is not much a different case for me. Being more specific in case of Angular, Polymer is like directives in Angular 1.x while like components in upcoming Angular 2.x.
References
To be more sure of what I am talking about and for additional sources on how to use the Polymer with Angular2 (Angular2 not released to this date)
you can check this video at "https://youtu.be/7WgEuNZCCHk?t=32m15s" starting from time 32:15 where Rob explains how to use the generic webcomponents/polymer as the components/View in the Angular2.
you can check this project "https://github.com/rkirov/youtube-app" which uses Angular2 and google-youtube web component.
https://github.com/ebidel/polymer-experiments/tree/master/polymer-and-angular/together
From the polymer-starter-kit
Framework-free, or framework-compatible
Build your app out of elements, or wire in an external framework to handle business logic. It's up to you!
So, in my view these two projects are not competing each other.
Webcomponent Specs
The webcomponent specs are here for one's reference
Custom Elements - http://w3c.github.io/webcomponents/spec/custom/
HTML Imports - http://w3c.github.io/webcomponents/spec/imports/
Shadow DOM - http://w3c.github.io/webcomponents/spec/shadow/
I just wish the webcomponents are native to the evergreen browsers ASAP.
From the Polymer Starter Kit:
"Framework-free, or framework-compatible
Build your app out of elements, or wire in an external framework to handle business logic. It's up to you!"
Update:
What was described as Carbon Elements seems to fall under:
Polymer(version 2) App Toolbox
Component-based architecture using Polymer and web components.
Responsive design using the app layout components.
Modular routing using the elements.
Localization with <app-localize-behavior>.
Turnkey support for local storage with app storage elements.
Offline caching as a progressive enhancement, using service workers.
Build tooling to support serving your app multiple ways: unbundled for delivery over HTTP/2 with server push, and bundled for delivery over HTTP/1.
Carbon Elements adding framework features
During The Polymer Summit 2015 Keynote, Google announced a new "Polymer idiomatic and framework oriented" set of elements, tentatively named the Carbon elements.
Some quotes from the longer tjsavage answer regarding Angular 2 vs Polymer Carbon:
"The trick is in thinking about the web platform as an application framework... Polymer the library is to the web components component model as the carbon elements will be to using the web platform itself as an application framework: the opinionated rails to make it easier to understand and achieve."
"Angular 2 will provide one way of structuring your application that uses Angular's view of what makes a good application structure. The carbon elements will provide a different way of structuring your application that more directly uses what the web platform itself provides as its structural underpinning."
Polymer is almost fully functional.
Currently it is missing routing for example but this doesn't mean you can't do this with Polymer.
There is now https://elements.polymer-project.org/elements/app-route
In Dart also dependency injection works fine with Polymer because of the types. If it's possible in Dart, it's possible in JS as well because Dart transpiles to JS. DI in plain JS might be more cumbersome though.
In this package (Dart)
https://github.com/bwu-dart/bwu_polymer_routing
I made the routing and DI packages used by Angular.dart available for Polymer. There are also routing packages for Polymer.js available.
I put together some router demos. The "missing parts" really depend on what type of application you're building.
https://github.com/erikringsmuth/polymer-router-demos
I've used it as both, as an enhancement to an app written in another framework, and as the full framework itself, where it was responsible for every element on the page.
I really like just about everything about Polymer, so I've been very happy using it for the whole app, even built my own router. If you've got an existing app I'd recommend dipping your toe in the water, as Polymer works great composed into other apps to see if it's to your liking.
Let me give this another try:
The key behind web-components (and thus Polymer) is, that they are self-contained. You have a web-component somewhere, you import it, and (if you're lucky) it just works, wherever it comes from. The web-component will NOT interfere other components. So doing things like MVC is not Polymers business (although it provides a data-binding mechanism), as this belongs to the process of tying things together. It is considered to be best practice that these kind of things are solved by creating new elements too, that create and react to events. When it comes to the model you code non-visual web-components, that don't have/need a template. TodoMVC has an (outdated) example for that (https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/tree/gh-pages/examples/polymer).
So Angular gives you a path to follow on how to do MVVM, whereas it is up to you on how to do the "logic" in your app when using Polymer. IMHO Angular is for more complex and rather enclosed apps, whereas Polymer is for any kind of app, that embraces the web. You even can use Polymer, if you're not writing an app at all ;)
On the Polymer Getting Started page, we see an example of Polymer in action:
<html>
<head>
<!-- 1. Shim missing platform features -->
<script src="polymer-all/platform/platform.js"></script>
<!-- 2. Load a component -->
<link rel="import" href="x-foo.html">
</head>
<body>
<!-- 3. Declare the component by its tag. -->
<x-foo></x-foo>
</body>
</html>
What you will notice is <x-foo></x-foo> being defined by platform.js and x-foo.html.
It seems like this is the equivalent to a directive module in AngularJS:
angular.module('xfoo', [])
.controller('X-Foo', ['$scope',function($scope) {
$scope.text = 'hey hey!';
})
.directive('x-foo', function() {
return {
restrict: 'EA',
replace: true,
controller: 'X-Foo',
templateUrl: '/views/x-foo.html',
link: function(scope, controller) {
}
};
});
What is the difference between the two?
What problems does Polymer solve that AngularJS has not or will not?
Are there plans to tie Polymer in with AngularJS in the future?
You're not the first to ask this question :) Let me clarify a couple of things before getting to your questions.
Polymer's webcomponents.js is a library that contains several polyfills for various W3C APIs that fall under the Web Components umbrella. These are:
Custom Elements
HTML Imports
<template>
Shadow DOM
Pointer Events
others
The left-nav in the documentation (polymer-project.org) has a page for all of these "Platform technologies". Each of those pages also has a pointer to the individual polyfill.
<link rel="import" href="x-foo.html"> is an HTML Import. Imports are a useful tool for including HTML in other HTML. You can include <script>, <link>, markup, or whatever else in an import.
Nothing "links" <x-foo> to x-foo.html. In your example, it's assumed the Custom Element definition of <x-foo> (e.g. <element name="x-foo">) is defined in x-foo.html. When the browser sees that definition, it's registered as a new element.
On to questions!
What is the difference between Angular and Polymer?
We covered some of this in our Q&A video. In general, Polymer is a library that aims to use (and show how to use) Web Components. Its foundation is Custom Elements (e.g. everything you build is a web component) and it evolves as the web evolves. To that end, we only support the latest version of the modern browsers.
I'll use this image to describe Polymer's entire architecture stack:
RED layer: We get tomorrow's web through a set of polyfills. Keep in mind, those libraries go away over time as browsers adopt the new APIs.
YELLOW layer: Sprinkle in some sugar with polymer.js. This layer is our opinion on how to use the spec'd APIs, together. It also adds things like data-binding, syntatic sugar, change watchers, published properties...We think these things are helpful for building web component-based apps.
GREEN: The comprehensive set of UI components (green layer) is still in progress. These will be web components that use all of the red + yellow layers.
Angular directives vs. Custom Elements?
See Alex Russell's answer. Basically, Shadow DOM allows composing bits of HTML but also is a tool for encapsulating that HTML. This is fundamentally a new concept on the web and something other frameworks will leverage.
What problems does Polymer solve that AngularJS has not or will not?
Similarities: declarative templates, data binding.
Differences: Angular has high level APIs for services, filters, animations, etc., supports IE8, and at this point, is a much more robust framework for building production apps. Polymer is just starting out in alpha.
Are there plans to tie Polymer in with AngularJS in the future?
They're separate projects. That said, both the Angular and Ember teams announced they'll eventually move to using the underlying platform APIs in their own frameworks.
^ This is a huge win IMO. In a world where web developers have powerful tools (Shadow DOM, Custom Elements), framework authors also can utilize these primitives to create better frameworks. Most of them currently go through great hoops to "get the job done".
UPDATE:
There's a really great article on this topic: "Here’s the difference between Polymer and Angular"
For your question:
Are there plans to tie Polymer in with AngularJS in the future?
From the official twitter account of AngularJS : "angularjs will use polymer for its widgets. It's win-win"
source : https://twitter.com/angularjs/status/335417160438542337
In this video 2 guys from AngularJS talked about differences and similarities about this two frameworks (AngularJS 1.2 and Beyond).
These links will bring you to the correct Q&A's:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W13qDdJDHp8&feature=share&t=56m34s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W13qDdJDHp8&feature=share&t=59m8s
1 & 2) Polymer components are scoped because of their hidden tree in the shadow dom. That means that their style and behaviour cannot bleed out. Angular is not scoped to that particular directive you create like a polymer web component. An angular directive could possibly conflict with something in your global scope. IMO the benefit you will get from polymer is what I explained.. modular components that have scoped css & JavaScript to that particular component that nothing can touch. Untouchable DOM!
Angular directives can be created so that you can annotate an element with several pieces of functionality. In Polymer web components that is not the case. If you want to combine functionality of components you include two components into another component (or wrap them in another component) or you can extend an existing component. Remember the main difference still is that each component is scoped in polymer web components. You can share css & js files across several components or you can inline them.
3) Yes, Angular plans on incorporating polymer in version 2+ according to Rob Dodson and Eric Bidelman
It's funny how nobody here has mentioned the word scope. I think that is one of the major differences.
There are many differences, but they also have a heck of a lot in common when it comes to creating modular lego like pieces of functionality for an app. I think it's safe to say that Angular would be the application framework and polymer could one day live in the same app along side directives with the major difference being scope but polymer may be a replacement for a lot of your current directives. But I see no reason why Angular could not work as-is and include polymer components as well.
Reading through the answers again while I write this, I noticed that Eric Bidelman(ebidel) did kind of cover that in his answer:
"Shadow DOM allows composing bits of HTML but also is a tool for encapsulating that HTML."
To give credit where credit is due, I got my answers from listening to many interviews with Rob Dodson and Eric Bidelman. But I feel the answer wasn't worded to give this guy's question the understanding that he wanted. With that said, I think I have touched on the answer he is looking for, but in no way do I possess more information about the subject than Rob Dodson and Eric Bidelman
Here are my main sources for the information I have gathered.
JavaScript Jabber - Polymer with Rob Dodson and Eric Bidelman
Shop Talk Show - Web Components With Rob Dodson
Polymer is a Web Components shim
"Web Components" is a new set of standards that is enveloped by HTML 5 designed to provide reusable building blocks for web applications.
Browsers are at various states of implementing the "Web Components" specification, and therefore it's too early to write HTML using Web Components.
But alas! Polymer to the rescue! Polymer is a library that provides an abstraction layer to your HTML code, allowing it to make use of the Web Components API as if it were fully implemented in all browsers. This is called poly-filling, and the Polymer team distributes this library as webcomponents.js. This used to be called platform.js btw.
But Polymer is more than a polyfill library for web components...
Polymer also provides open and reusable Web Component building blocks via Elements
All elements can be customized and extended. These are used as building blocks for anything from social widgets to animation to web API clients.
Polymer is not a web application framework
Polymer is more of a library than a framework.
Polymer does not have support for things like routes, application scope, controllers, etc.
But it does have two-way binding, and using components "feels" just like using Angular directives.
Although there are some overlaps between Polymer and AngularJS, they are not the same. In fact, the AngularJS team has mentioned utilizing Polymer libraries in upcoming releases.
Also note that Polymer is still considered "bleeding edge" while AngularJS is stabilizing.
It will be interesting to watch both of these Google projects evolve!
I think from a practical perspective, in the end the template feature of angular directives, and the web component methodology leveraged by polymer both accomplish the same task. The major differences as I can see it are that polymer leverages web APIs to include bits of HTML, a more syntactically correct, and simplistic way of achieving what Angular does programatically as it renders templates. Polymer is however as has been stated, a small framework for building declarative and interactive templates using components. It is made available for UI design purposes only, and is only supported in the most modern browsers. AngularJS is a complete MVC framework designed to make web applications declarative by use of data bindings, dependencies, and directives. They're two completely different animals. To your question, it seems to me at this point you'll get no major benefit from using polymer over angular, except having dozens of pre built components, however that would still require you to port those over to angular directives. In the future however, as the web APIs become more advanced, web components will completely remove the need to programatically define and build templates as the browser will be able to simply include them in a similar way to how it handles javascript or css files.
The MVVM (model-view, view-model) that Angular offers is not a concern that Polymer aims at solving. The composable & re-usable nature that Angular directives give to you with (a custom tag + associated logic combination) is a more sane comparison when you consider comparing Angular and Polymer. Angular is and will remain a broader purpose-serving framework.
What is the difference between the two?
To a user: Not much. You can build awesome apps with both.
To a developer: They use way different syntax so either solution has a fairly steep learning curve. Angular has been around longer and has a HUGE community so you'd be hard pressed to find problems that haven't been solved.
To an architect: Very different. Angular is an application framework responsible for all aspects of your life. It even has directives vertically integrated in case you want component like features. Polymer on the other hand is more like pay-as-you-go. You want a modal, sure thing, you want an interactive widget, no problem, you want route handling, we can do that to. Polymer is also more portable in that Angular requires an Angular app to reuse directives. The idea with Polymer is be more moduler and will work in other apps, even Angular apps.
What problems does Polymer solve that AngularJS has not or will not?
Polymer is an approach to head towards taking advantage of the new web components standards. If features like custom elements, Shadow DOM, and HTML imports are supported locally, it would be foolish not to take advantage of them. Currently most web component features are not widely supported (current status) so Polymer acts as shim or a bridge. Kinda like a polyfill (in fact it does use polyfills).
Are there plans to tie Polymer in with AngularJS in the future?
We have been using Angular and Polymer together for over a year. Part of the decision to do this was based on promises made directly by the Polymer team to us that interoperability be there. We have given up on that idea. We are now moving towards using only Polymer.
To do it over again we probably would not have made the move to use Polymer at all, instead wait for it to mature. That being said Polymer has it's pros (some quite good) and cons (some of which are quite frustrating) but I think that is a discussion for another thread.
Angularjs directive is an approach for making custom elements. you can define new custom tags with custom attributes. Polymer can also do this but it'll do in an interesting and more simple way.Polymer actually is not a framework it's just a library.but a powerful and amazing library that you can fall in love with it (like me). Polymer let you learn the native web components technology made by w3c, that web browsers eventually implementing it.web component is the future technology, but polymer let you use that technology right now.Google Polymer is a library that provides syntactic sugar and polyfills for building elements and applications with web components.Remember that I said polymer is not a framework and it's a library.But when you're using Polymer, actually your framework is DOM.this post was about angular js ver 1 and polymer and I has been worked with both of them is my projects and I personally prefer polymer over angularjs. But Angular version 2 is completely different in compare of angularjs ver 1.directive in angular 2 has a different meaning.
Angular directives are conceptually similar to Custom Elements but they are implemented without the use of the Web Components APIs. Angular directives are a way to build custom elements, but Polymer and the Web Components specification are the standards-based way to do it.
polymer-element:
<polymer-element name="user-preferences" attributes="email">
<template>
<img src="https://secure.user-preferences.com/path/{{userID}}" />
</template>
<script>
Polymer('user-preferences', {
ready: function() {
this.userID= md5(this.email);
}
});
</script>
</polymer>
Angular directive:
app.directive('user-preferences', ['md5', function() {
return {
restrict: 'E',
link: function(scope, element, attrs) {
scope.userID= md5(attrs.email);
},
template: '<img src="https://secure.user-preferences.com/path/{{userID}}" />'
};
}]);