Use it if you have an Android app, too, at least.
Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?
71–80 of 82 posts
Re: Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?
#72I hope that the Mozilla people are working closely with the Google people on Polymer, and vice versa.
If you are building an internal tool or an application where you can dictate that they use a specific version of Chrome or Firefox then I think you should default to Polymer now. Or at least default to trying to make it work first before going on to other things.
Re: Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?
#73The Polymer website uses Polymer and it is slooooow. That's a huge red flag to me. I have nothing but good things to say about React. Try that instead.
Agree, Designer tool looks kinda nice. BUT, it is slow in FF30, Safari and failed a lot in IE11. IMO, Big G is trying very hard to push web technologies that tightly couple to Chrome - same as what MS/IE did a few years back trying hard to force ActiveX, Silverlight down the developers' throat. I'm betting < 20% chance Polymer will still be in IO talk 3 years from now. (remember GWT, Dart, Angular?)
Regarding performance: it will get much better once browser have implemented http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-shadow-dom-20140617/. Shadow DOM is not easy to polyfill (especially because of some issues in how the browser's C++ objects were presented to JavaScript as prototypes.)
Regarding IE failures -- do you have any more information? All of the elements should be cross platform. It would be great to file these issues at https://github.com/Polymer, if you haven't already.
Re: Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?
#74What is it about the home page that makes the font face (on everything) adjust weight as you hover on different things? This even happens in Chrome. That can't be by design.
Re: Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree, Designer tool looks kinda nice. BUT, it is slow in FF30, Safari and failed a lot in IE11. IMO, Big G is trying very hard to push web technologies that tightly couple to Chrome - same as what MS/IE did a few years back trying hard to force ActiveX, Silverlight down the developers' throat. I'm betting < 20% chance Polymer will still be in IO talk 3 years from now. (remember GWT, Dart, Angular?)
People keep confusing this it seems. What Google is doing here is NOT like what Microsoft did. Google is merely implement many new HTML5 features ahead of Microsoft (which is usually the most behind in HTML5 support) and others. So it's not that they are "built for Chrome". It's that they are built for "new HTML5 specs" and only Chrome happens to support them right now. Point me to where Silverlight was an HTML spec?…
> "at least they are open source"
Kinda of remind me of how "open" android is progressing. More and more "features" are pushing into "google experience" layers - also look at how open is the android TV.
BTW, chrome is doing the same on the extension side.
I see the pro/con on the "extension move" - reduce the security risk , etc.
But it is sure feel like the Jedi master is feeling the power of the dark side - "working within the system" is not as fun as just being the Empire.
Re: Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?
#76The Polymer website uses Polymer and it is slooooow. That's a huge red flag to me. I have nothing but good things to say about React. Try that instead.
React seems so complicated in comparison to Angular templates. Am I wrong?
I've done projects in both Angular and React and I find the latter to be much simpler to reason about. Scopes, transclusions and directives are often confusing. React is just nestable Polymer-like components of encapsulated markup and behaviour.
A React component at its most basic is just an object that implements a render() method that is responsible for rendering markup. See the React home page for examples http://facebook.github.io/react/index.html.
Since React is just a view layer though, you're left to your own devices for everything else. So if you're evaluating it from the perspective of a whole SPA, then it becomes more complicated.
Re: Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?
#77I'm not sold on the idea that you need Web Components (and thus Polymer/React) to build or maintain a complex web app. I think that "complex" can mean a lot of different things. I know from experience that things like and Web Workers are already showing a lot of promise by bringing multi-threaded processing to the browser for graphics- and other CPU-intensive operations. I'm also excited for WebRTC, the telephony APIs, WebGL, and other things. These things will help us build complex web apps.
When it comes to code maintainability, there is no shortage of organizational frameworks (backbone, angular, etc.), utility libraries (jQuery, underscore, etc.). These are helping me build complex apps.
What is Polymer doing for me? Allowing me to use Web Components and shadow DOM? Oh, how earth-shattering. No thanks.
Re: Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?
#78I've just played around with it, I hate it at first glance. It's like Google is now saying we need to follow their pattern to make a responsive website.
Re: Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you keep everything external it works fine. We have a large project in Polymer, and we use CoffeeScript and Sass, with no problem.
got an example? I've not seen any decent 'assembly' tools that pull all the bits together (ie. specifically post compile, turning your separate elements into one self contained .html include)
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Re: Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?
#80A couple of down sides of web components: - they interact poorly with requirejs and amd in general. - they flat out dont work at all in IE8 - there's no 'good' solution for the request hell you get from loading 50 components; although some of the tooling is getting there (vulcanize). - the tooling in general is currently rubbish; no way to easily combine sass + jade + coffee into a web component (eg. with gulp, no th…
For anyone using Rails, I've made a gem which integrates Web components seamlessly into the asset pipeline. This gives you two things: 1. In production, all imports get concatenation into 1 HTML import. 2. Any web component can use assets that need to be compiled, such as SCSS or CoffeeScript. It's called Emcee, and is available here: http://www.github.com/ahuth/emcee
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