Components allow us to build simpler applications by composing independent parts into a greater system. Good component design means you should only need to focus on one component at a time, holding less information in your active mind in order to complete a task. This gives you more mental capacity to focus on the task at hand and ultimately make better decisions.

With a realtime bidirectional data channel, we have to the power to make our devices interact with one another. As a result, this has opened up the doors for more interactive experiences using Web Components & Polymer.

Web Components have been on developers’ radars for quite some time now. They were first introduced to the world at Google IO 2011. The concept shook the community up and became the topic of many future talks and discussions.

By now, 4 years on, Web Components should be everywhere, but in reality Chrome is the only browser with ‘some version’ of Web Components. Even with polyfills it’s clear Web Components won’t be fully embraced by the community until the majority of browsers are on-board.

On May 29, 2015, the polymer team announced the release of Polymer 1.0. Since the release of Polymer 0.5 developer preview, the team has rewritten the library from the ground up, with increased performance and better functionality as results.

Polymer is one of the first implementations of a user interface library built upon the Web Components standard. Web Components are not fully supported by browsers, but they provide a polyfill library, webcomponents.js, that provides enough functionality to support Web Components and Polymer.

I'm building a small web app at the moment, and so I've taken the opportunity to give Polymer 1.0 a proper test drive. The question I was asking myself: can I get all these goodies without making users pay a huge performance cost?

I’ll be blunt about my feelings on Polymer 0.5, which I considered a framework: it gave me all the wrong feels. It tried to do so much, and in one go, and it like eating a 5 course dinner when all you wanted was a salad. After all, there’s no hard requirement to make your own elements. Semantic markup does just fine, and it’s hard to beat the browser at components that its engineers have had years to refine.

Polymer and Angular.js are two incredibly popular projects that are run by Google. The two projects serve different purposes yet can, with some coercion, be made to work together. Eric Bidelman, a dev from the Polymer team, made a great youtube video on this (which can be found here) and I wanted to give another example of the two projects working side-by-side.