Today, there was an online event called “Hello Polymer”, in which Polymer team members Eric Bidelman, Alex Komoroske and Matthew McNulty talked about the framework. This blog post summarizes what happened.
The actual video of the event starts at 2:40.
The following diagram describes the architecture of Polymer:
<yt-search-video imfeelinglucky="{{$.input.value}}" ...>
It’s main goal is to bootstrap an ecosystem around web components. Everyone will profit from the powerful widgets created as part of the project. Framework authors can use what they want from Polymer and ignore the rest.
Additionally, the Polymer team wants to figure out how to best use the new APIs and to help people with them. Polymer is work in progress. While there are people on the team that have much experience with various frameworks, the setting of Polymer is completely new. All of a sudden the DOM is the framework. As a consequence, if something doesn’t work like it should, the team gives feedback to standards bodies and tries to fix it. The mission of Polymer could be described as “help build the web of tomorrow”.
Polymer is still pre-alpha! But there is much interest from within Google and from framework authors.
Polymer works on the latest versions of all browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.). Older browsers are ignored. Polyfilling on them is simply too difficult and Polymer needs to look ahead in order to make progress. Some things can’t be polyfilled perfectly on all browsers yet (e.g. the encapsulation provided by the Shadow DOM), which means that Polymer has to compromise and/or wait for browsers to catch up.
Yes you can. Polymer [as opposed to platform.js] is a very thin layer that will get even thinner over time.
You don’t want to break existing content if you add new tags to HTML. Thus, the names of the latter tags will never have dashes in them. The original rules for the names of custom elements were more complicated (a prefix x- was required), but the Polymer team figured out a simpler way and gave feedback to standards bodies.
It has nothing to do with AngularJS (and ng-app), it’s simply an example of a custom tag.
AngularJS taught people how to think declaratively. Web components are framework-independent. The only thing that is tricky is to combine Polymer with another framework inside a web component.
[Additionally, AngularJS and Ember.js have announced their migration strategies towards web components [3].]
It’s still too early, but first experiments have started.