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Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project?

9 points by illuminek ↗ HN
I have been planning to use polymer for next project for frontend and rails on server. I have read the article posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7970781 I am still noticing that polymer is slow on FF,Safari etc(almost freezes for 2 secs). However works great on chrome.

Project would be mobile first web app(or may be mobile only). I am also considering Phonegap along with polymer. Is it a good idea to use phonegap? Is it going slow down even further?

Google I/O talks highly about but I don't see much improvement in performance and also I am doubtful if the eco system is mature enough to consider it to ship a product in next 2 months or so?

10 comments

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cyrusaf
I used Polymer for a project a few months ago and I ran into browser support issues. Polyfills helped for most browsers, but my application wasn't working on iOS Safari. I'm not sure if that is still the case, but if so, I would choose to use a different framework such as Angular (easy to pick up) or React (slightly more difficult to pick up).
filipstachura
During Polymer was in beta I had same problems (safari). Would be good to check if that is solved with 1.0.
catpolice
I'm optimistic about web components, but I don't think Polymer's ready yet - I was seeing their demo components not work in a new Chrome on Linux just a couple months ago (they still may not work, I'm too lazy to go through the examples right now).

The main two draws of Polymer are that it's built on web components (which are cool and futuristic) and that it implements material design (which is nice looking). There are other material design widget libraries however, even ones made by Google. Have you seen MDL (http://www.getmdl.io/)? It's a more minimalistic CSS/Javascript approach and will probably be faster and more cross compatible.

FWIW the three things you mentioned (Polymer, Angular, React) are kind of dissimilar in an apple-to-oranges way:

* Polymer is basically a UI widget library with some other bits thrown in - it doesn't really help you structure your application, it's just widgets for building the view layer.

* Angular is a full-ish MVC platform that provides you with tools to build your own UI components/widgets

* React is just a toolkit for building UI components, and it doesn't come with anything else (but it does encourage a kind of design where you don't need much else)

Neither of the latter two come with pre-built widgets: you have to make them yourself or find libraries of them made by others (which is pretty easy to do).

For my money, your expectation on which of these is easy to pick up is backwards: Angular is way, way more complex than React and has a much higher learning curve. React does basically one thing (and does it very well) so there's really not much to learn about it at all - you can pick it up in a day once you wrap your head around the rendering-as-a-pure-function-of-state concept. Angular is a full framework and it does a lot of things and is opinionated about how it does them, so there's a whole lot more to learn. If you need all that MVC stuff done for you, Angular might be the way to go though (but beware the coming 2.0 transition that's going to break all backwards compatibility completely).

I personally like React a lot - I'm probably going to try to wrap MDL components in React for a project I'm working on right now.

illuminek
Thanks for sharing the link http://www.getmdl.io/ I did not know about it.

I think you are right, Team is thinking in similar lines. Thanks.

smarks159
The reason polymer is slow on firefox and not on chrome is because firefox does not support html imports yet, so polymer uses a polyfill that relies on asynchronously loading the html which causes a delay in the initial load. Support for html imports is not implemented in safari either.[1]

[1] http://caniuse.com/#feat=imports

spankalee
The HTML imports polyfill shouldn't be much slower than native, since native imports are also asynchronous, but block execution of subsequent scripts. Any (small) slowdown would be from the browsers pre-scanner not knowing to optimistically load imports. This can be avoided completely by using the `vulcanize` tool which bundles all imports into one file.
spankalee
First, are you using Polymer 1.0? It's much lighter weight than Polymer 0.5.

Second, is this a big project with lots of transitively dependencies? Like ES6 modules, HTML imports encourages more granular files that can be referenced and loaded individually. With HTTP/1 this can cause slowdowns as you hit the browser's request limit. HTTP/2 loads a bunch of small files significantly faster. For production we recommend the `vulcanize` tool which concatenates all HTML imports into one file for fast loading.

If you are using 1.0, do you have an example that shows the 2 second freeze? That shouldn't be happening.