Developing Web Components

Chapter 18. Final Words

Jarrod Overson

Congratulations—you know just enough about web components to start having a good time developing web applications. Once you start scratching the surface you’ll discover a vast world that will delight and surprise you. Web components aren’t the solution to every problem, though, and they present more questions than they answer—new questions that require new paradigms and patterns.

The field is also moving extremely quickly. To put it in perspective, when we started working on this book we planned to include a chapter on decorators, but that was eventually scrapped as the spec fizzled into nonexistence; the specs around creating custom components changed; Polymer went from alpha to beta to nearing a 1.0 release; and Chrome 36 stable shipped with full web component support out of the box. In a very short time web components went from a barely usable pipe dream to something that is legitimate and out in the wild.

This book is early for the realm of web components. We’re on top of it all and intend this book to be a transitional primer for people moving from the existing world of widget writing to the new world of web component authoring. Hopefully you’ll see multiple revisions of this book, each focusing on current best practices as the landscape evolves.

Where Do We Go from Here?

It is important to stay up to speed with the state of web components on the Web. This book is not able to be the final answer (yet…), so you’ll need ...