Last week I was able to attend a Google I/O extended in Bluffdale Utah and it was awesome. There were a ton of cool things announced in the Android space but for me the best part was, by far, the announcing of Polymer 1.0!

I recently went through the process of upgrading one of my applications (yes, I know the announcement was two days ago... I was excited) and wanted to share some of my learnings as well as the steps I took. This

I recently co-authored Web Components from jQuery to Polymer with Jarrod Overson. This was the first book I had co-written. The process was challenging and interesting especially with respect to the topic, web components. This is not only because the specifications are somewhat moving targets, but also because the initial book proposal did not even include web components! However, I believe the end result was much better than it could have been if the goal had been a web components book from the start.

In a world where you can create your own <awesome-button> tag and distribute it with a simple <link rel="import">, a whole range of options for composability and reusability emerges.

Web Components are coming and there are many challenges coming along. How we connect component authors with component consumers is one of them.

Today we’re incredibly excited to announce the 1.0 release of the Polymer library.

Since the 0.5 “Developer Preview” release, we’ve re-written the library from the ground up, focusing on cross-browser performance while keeping the developer-friendly ergonomics. The new library is 3x faster on Chrome, 4x faster on Safari, and 36% less code than in developer preview. And it’s ready to be used in production applications.

Encapsulation is at the core of Web Components, aim to provide the user a simple element interface that is rendered with complexity hidden under the hood.

Browsers often do this kind of encapsulation internally. Elements like <select> or <video> are rendered as unreachable DOM subtrees, only the browser vendors really know what’s in there.

The point of extending styles is to reuse code. If you’ve defined some base-level styles, you want to be able to use those styles again without having to rewrite them. And if you need to change those base-level styles, you want those changes to propagate throughout.

Simply reusing code is easy. But reusing code in a way that is predictable, maintainable, and scalable is hard. Fortunately, computer scientists have been studying these problems for decades, and a lot of the principles of good software design apply to CSS as well