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Ask HN: Do you use Polymer?

2 points by stemuk ↗ HN
When the HN community is talking about frameworks/libraries for building web apps, I rarely see Polymer mentioned between the big two, Angular and React. So: do you use Polymer (http://polymer-project.org) and if you do, what do you think of it in terms of speed and ease of development?

I personally use Polymer on a daily basis, but the lack of conversation around this library keeps me questioning its (wide-spread) adaption...

4 comments

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maxharris
I don't use Polymer. It's a non-starter at work, and I wouldn't even consider it for a personal project.

Like it or not, React won, and there is zero chance of this changing. Everyone on my team knows React, and they've never heard of Polymer. Unless Polymer is 10X better (and it is not), we're not switching.

In addition to being the de facto standard, another huge advantage of React is the ecosystem that has developed around it. React Native is amazing, and is the obvious way to go if you want to make a great mobile app (i.e., one that uses truly native UI controls and is not built on top of a slow web browser.) In addition, Redux is awesome and Polymer has nothing specific to offer there (and even if you did manage to wire Polymer up to Redux, why bother?) Finally, React is going places: React is being extended to do layout (taking over from the browser), which will finally make the browser a decent application development platform.

I'm sorry to be so blunt, but this is the way I think things really are. I am aware that (a few) others may see it differently...

ergo14
De facto standards are web browser standards - and react is not one. Web Components are. If your friends at work never heard about polymer than maybe its about time to read about standards and browser API's that are being implemented - it is part of the job to learn. Good engineers do this.

And lets remember like VueJS, Angular 2.x, Aurelia that use some parts of standards that polymer builds on are also popular.

React is very popular today, like jquery was in the past. It is already visible that things are in the flux. You just project a bubble around you.

Next 5 years we will be discussing the next cool thing, the trick is - most of polymer is being implemented inside browsers already. I've seen this pattern so many times over last 20 years...

dgelks
We use Polymer extensively throughout our front-end, the speed/ease of development is decent - you can avoid reinventing the wheel using the polymer catalog and 3rd party components. With WebComponents support improving with each browser release (Shadow DOM now in Safari 10) and 2.0 release of Polymer coming up soon things seem to be going well in the ecosystem - would have to admit React is definitely in fashion right now though.
ergo14
There are tons of enterprises using polymer already in production. One of the biggest companies in the world in their industry: ING, SalesForce, Electronic Arts, Google (including Youtube). Polymer community slack is growing greatly - there are a lot of components that people share, browser vendors finally agreed on shadow dom v1 API, things are looking really great.