Introduction to Polymer.JS – A JavaScript library

Polymer is an open source, cross-platform library which provides supports for building custom HTML elements with Web components. Polymer takes advantage of the emerging web components standards and thus the arrival of Polymer is a treat to the developers who are eager to build modern web technologies.

Polymer is a library that enables you to use web components specs called Polyfills. In addition to Polyfills, it has its own set of elements which can be useful in creating your own customized and reusable elements.

Polymer helps developers to create custom elements with the latest Web Components specifications. One of the advantages of Polymer is that it has a built-in data binding model that enables making applications without using any other libraries.

The beauty of using custom oriented approach to web development is that if your fancy a specific widget or feature and that element already exist, then using it as simple as installing the library and invoking the custom tag.

Below is a list of elements Polymer 2.0 is offering;

>> Iron elements: A set of utility elements including generic UI elements (such as icons, input and layout components), as well as non-UI elements providing features like AJAX, signaling and storage.

>> Paper elements: A set of UI elements that implement the material design system.

>> Gold elements: Form elements for ecommerce.

>> Neon elements: Animation-related elements.

>> Platinum elements: Elements for app-like features, like push notifications, offline caching and Bluetooth.

Custom Elements

If your application’s needs go beyond the existing elements of Polymer’s catalog, you can always build your own. Building a new HTML element in Polymer is as easy. To register a new element create an ES6 class that extends Polymer.Element, then call the customElements.define method, which registers a new element with the browser.

Polyfills

As many browsers are yet in the process of updating to support Web Components standards, meanwhile you can certainly use Polyfills that simulate the missing browser capabilities as closely as possible. Polyfills expands the Polymer Library’s browser compatibility. You can use custom HTML elements today and as more and more browsers will undertake the Web components standards, the payload to run your apps and elements will decrease.

Why use Polymer JS?

“The Polymer core provides a thin layer of API on top of web components. It expresses Polymer’s opinion, provides the extra sugaring that all Polymer elements use, and is meant to help make developing web components much easier.”

With Polymer you can compose enclosed JS, CSS, and HTML as Custom elements.

Fast: The Polymer is a new library which is three times faster on Chrome, four times faster on Safari. It can be easily used in producing applications and is believed to be easier for developing feature-rich applications and websites.

Reduces the gap between developer and designer: Polymer assures an easy working relationship between designers who use Web page UX and developers who are concerned with Web page functionality. Developers use Polymer elements which include design and themes, which means there is no need to modify complex Web page source code to match designer specifications.

Polymer uses custom elements, Shadow DOM, HTML templates and HTML imports to define a custom element. You should consider using Polymer if,

>> You want to create your own custom HTML element

>> There is an existing element that requires a new feature to be used on your website

>> You want to build a website that will be compatible with the evolving W3C standards

>> You want to meet the standards of the future componentized web development