The 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.
I also had issues with it crashing safari on an ipad
Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?
41–50 of 82 posts
Re: Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?
#42The 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?)
Re: Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?
#43It depends on what kind of website or web app you are working on. I noticed that polymer is not really suitable for highly dynamic web applications. With ReactJS you can use all of the javascript control structures (if/then/else, conditions, loops, functions etc). With polymer you are restricted to bind, repeat and ref, which are not enough to adequately cover the requirements of a complex application. My recomendati…
Polymer is used to build very complex applications.
Not only do Polymer templates have bind, if, repeat, and ref, which are enough to cover the _vast_ majority of cases, by they work by binding to an expression which can drive more complex behavior.
I'm curious what you think you can't do with Polymer templates?
Re: Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?
#44I would also be interested in comparisons with http://www.x-tags.org/
One of the biggest differences is that X-Tags doesn't have templating or data-binding, or some of the sugar for reacting to DOM changes. With X-Tags you either manipulate the DOM directly, or bring in another library.
Re: Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?
#45I haven't built an application in Polymer yet (though I did have a good experience building a small application about a year and a half ago with Dart's WebUI library, which implemented a lot of the Web Component features before Polymer and the web browser layer was ready), so I don't have any advice on how ready Polymer is for prime-time yet.
What I will say is that we should remember that Web Components is where the web platform is going. This isn't some one-off library by Google; both Chrome and Firefox are getting all of the web component primitives built into the browser, and it looks promising that we'll see them arrive in IE and Safari as well. Polymer is some sugar on top of those primitives to make them easier to work with, but in any case, the next generation of web apps will start using web components and probably some library like Polymer or XTags. The time to start learning and playing around with web components is now, even if it's not time to build massive applications in them quite yet.
Re: Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - they interact poorly with requirejs and amd in general. > - the tooling in general is currently rubbish; no way to easily combine sass + jade + coffee into a web component (eg. with gulp, no the dart bindings don't count as tooling). no way to have external resource files. If you use Dart and its Polymer libraries, these two things should not be a problem. Why does that not count? He didn't say he wants to use Sa…
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…
Why the hostile reaction? Expanding your horizons is not a bad thing.
> Most javascript developers want to use Javascript
OP mentions nothing, parent mentions CoffeeScript.
Dart also has packages and an official package manager. It also has a dogfooded official Polymer library. Setting up a modular toy project with packages was easier to understand in Dart than JS for me. I don't see how I'm "bloody well not helping".
Re: Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?
#47I 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…
Angular directives, Ember components, or any other framework's components are not the same as Web Components. The browser doesn't, and won't ever, understand what they are. They have very weak encapsulation unless used solely within a single framework. You can't easily use them across frameworks.
The current battle of frameworks has lead to massive fragmentation. Pulling together a React view with an Angular dropdown and an Ember tree view is damn near impossible.
Web Components are real elements. You can use them wherever you can use elements - including in all those other frameworks. That's the difference.
Re: Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?
#48A 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…
With ReactJS you get to code as if everything is a component, why use polymer now instead of that?
Re: Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slow UI or slow loading? Slow loading is due to all the HTML imports generating HTTP requests. This can be optimised by inlining the web-components, using a tool like https://github.com/Polymer/vulcanize I'm not sure why the polymer website is not optimised like this. [edit] Here's what vulcanize does: http://polymer-twitter.badsyntax.co:8002/build.html (Code here: https://github.com/badsyntax/polymer-twitter ) Conca…
For me, on Firefox 30, I can see the basic structure of the page immediately, then my browser freezes for ~1.5 seconds, and I see the rest. I checked out the front page in FF's devtools, and could only see two uncached network requests, both to youtube.com. So I am assuming that Polymer itself isn't hitting the network. Furthermore AJAX doesn't freeze the browser, so I can only conclude that it's the actual JS that i…
It's slow for me also on Chrome 35, but i can't jump to any assumptions on why, without doing the proper debug. For example, the home page is loading a video and adding syntax highlighting to code examples, which can also be slow. Also the UX can be improved using [unresolved] on elements: http://www.polymer-project.org/docs/polymer/styling.html#fou...
Re: Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?
#50I have been playing a lot with Polymer over the last 4 months or so. Here are my thoughts:
From what I can tell Polymer works closely with the Chrome team and the features that this "framework" offers are really just upcoming tech that is being built into chrome and is being made available by Polymer. Things like web components, html imports, templating etc... are built built into the browser so the longer you use polymer the less of polymer you will use.
When I describe polymer to people I say it's an opinion layer on top of upcoming tech. And in addition to that everything is polyfilled to some older browsers, but right now is aimed towards the evergreen browsers.
When you ask "should I use Polymer", what I hear is, "should I get a jump start on the upcoming future of the web"? Lets be clear here, Mozilla, IE, Chrome etc... are all merging on these technologies. Object observers, templating, web components etc... are all emerging, Polymer is just one way you can use them now and tie them all together in an opinionated way. If you don't like it you don't have to use polymer you could just use plain ol JS and achieve the exact same solution, just slightly more verbose and with less support.
Now as to wether or not you should use it? Depends who your audience is. If you need a huge wide support from old browsers, probably not. If you're doing tooling for your company then yeah I would, it would be great to get used to the way the web is migrating towards. Just keep in mind everything is still solidifying, so there might be some awkward corner cases or something, but honestly it's just plain old Javascript soooo it's pretty vanilla so you shouldn't have too much difficulty if you know JS.
Last thing I have to say about Polymer. It's going to stretch the way you think of the DOM and JS. The way everything is structured and the way you should be thinking about it is that every DOM node should be considered an instance of a class. The DOM node exposes an API and away you go plugging and playing into the rest of your JS. It's really fun once you get used to it. This will really stretch you when they introduce the ajax api as a DOM node. wat. Crazy things are happening, some good, some will need to be changed.
Full disclosure I work at Google as a software engineer that specializes in frontend, so I am exposed to this a lot though I do NOT work on the project. That's about it :)