Developing Web Components

Chapter 14. Introducing Polymer

Jarrod Overson

There are a number of caveats to the use of web components as they stand today, but there are lots of people from lots of companies doing their best to help get you started as quickly as possible. Polymer is one such project that has gained traction quickly and has proven itself to be invaluable in the web component revolution. Polymer is a BSD-licensed suite of libraries that enable you to be productive with web components immediately.

Polymer Mission Statement

The expressed focus of Polymer is to “embrace HTML as much as possible by encouraging the use of custom elements wherever possible.”

To help speed the adoption of future web technology, Polymer’s authors have created shims for all related aspects of web components and tangential technologies. These shims are entirely usable outside of Polymer and are accepted as standard shims by companies like Mozilla and Microsoft, who use them with their own web component frameworks.

Considering that it is such a bleeding-edge technology, the Polymer group has done excellent work easing the transition to web component adoption. Polymer (outside of the Polymer elements) consists of two distinct layers of code. In this respect it is similar to jQuery, which is made up of jQuery itself and Sizzle. Sizzle is the independent selector engine that normalizes DOM selection for browsers that don’t support getQuerySelector and similar methods. Most people aren’t even aware of this abstraction ...