Development status Active Type JavaScript library | Written in JavaScript, HTML | |
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Developer(s) Google and contributors Initial release May 27, 2015; 21 months ago (2015-05-27) Stable release 1.7.0 / September 29, 2016; 5 months ago (2016-09-29) | ||
Polymer is an open-source JavaScript library for building web applications using web components. The library is being developed by Google developers and contributors on GitHub. Modern design principles are implemented as a separate project using Google's Material Design design principles.
Contents
Polymer is used by a number of Google services and websites, including YouTube Gaming, Google I/O websites, Google Play Music and redesign of Google Sites.
History
Public development of Polymer began in Nov 14, 2013 with the release of a Promises Polyfill. This steadily expanded into a web design library covering visual styling guidelines (via Material Design), data binding, and a large number of "Core" and "Paper" web components. Core components were originally envisioned to encompass generic functionality that would be essential to most websites, while Paper components were intended to provide more specialized components with Material Design concepts forming a key part of their design. A major milestone was reached with the release of Version 0.5, which was considered the first version of the project ready for use by early adopters.
Google continued to revise the design of Polymer after the release of 0.5, with special consideration given to the performance issues a number of developers found issue with. This culminated with the release of Polymer 1.0 in 2015, which was the first "production ready" version of the library. Version 1.0 significantly improved the performance of Polymer, reducing load times by up to 7 times. With version 1.0 Google split the elements from the Polymer project to clearly distinguish the elements catalog from the Polymer polyfill & webcomponents-sugaring library.
On 14–15 September 2015 Google organized a Polymer Summit in Amsterdam.
Features
Polymer provides a number of features over vanilla web components:
Usage
Polymer has begun to gain increasing recognition in the market, with special attention paid to its structured design process, allowing for a "lego block" structure.
Custom elements
Custom elements can be created using the dom-module element provided by Polymer. Custom element definition comprises CSS style, HTML template of the element's local DOM, element properties, lifecycle callbacks and JavaScript methods:
The element defined above can be used in HTML code:
Libraries using Polymer
Vaadin Elements extends the Polymer element catalog with elements designed for business app use.