Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?

We are using it for implementing a rather large project. I plan on writing a few articles on our experiences with it in the next couple of months.

What you need to keep in mind that Polymer is largely experimental software, I would not recommend it yet for generic audience websites. The polyfills are nice, but you have to keep a tight eye on performance, and a new browser release could very easily pull out the rug from under you, as the Chrome release last month did, and make your site not work for a large chunk of users. I personally would not do it if I had a whole bunch of browsers I had to test every single thing in.

It also takes a little while to get accustomed to the Polymer way of doing things. Our app is a single page webapp and there's many things we had to find out for ourselves. Most Polymer documentation is about rendering views, not writing controllers or models that suit web applications.

From what I heard, they are working on a tighter integration with Angular. If that would become an official thing it would probably improve their opinionatedness on controllers/models. I personally am not a fan of Angular, so perhaps I would not follow that anyway ;)

The only reason to use polymer is if you need the L style UIs they discussed at Google I/O.

While Google's really good at Java apis, they're really terrible at JS apis. I love Google, but I would be very hesitant to use their JavaScript libraries or frameworks. A lot of people I've talked to (on irc, es-discus, etc.) don't agree with web components, but Google's pushing it hard.

Web components are poorly based good ideas, and polymer is poorly based on web components, and your app will be (poorly) based on that.

Other people have started posting some of the problems with polymer.

I would go with the idea behind Polymer but probably not Polymer itself. Most of the newer frameworks have some sort of component analog. Angular has directives, Ember has components. You can simulate components with Backbone/Marionette. ReactJS is AWESOME and fits right in with the whole component mentality. The project I did with straight Polymer was fun, but I ended up having to scrap it, as the Chrome last month caused blocker issues.

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

Most javascript developers want to use Javascript and want to use what's available in the defacto javascript package manager (npm) and want to use the build tool that works with the javascript packages (browserify). Suggesting using something other than Javascript, it's packages, and it's preeminent packager to get started with Polymer is exactly the problem parent was highlighting, and your suggestion is bloody not well helping.