Google Plan: Polymer & Angular

Question

Since Google IO has just ended, and Google has just released Polymer 1.0, I’m getting lost in Google’s intentions.

I am a developer in a small team (5-6), and we are trying to find the best structure / library for our next project.

Google released Angular.js a few years ago, and that was fine, but the learning curve was high and the maintainability of a medium / large project was a nightmare. Today angular2 is in alpha and has already been very criticized. I tried this todoapp (hourliert / angular2 -firetodo) related to firebasedb and I liked it, but it is very verbose compared to aurelia (check out the last durandal blog post).

I am currently using (small) webapp using a new polymer. I hate the fact that the polymer has not yet considered ES6. But I have to say that it’s nice (even in ES5) to use it. He feels very strict.

My question is: why doesn’t Google use polymer for a more public application (I only know this polymer application: Google Music, Broadcast Community, Google IO 2015, what is this?). It seems that angular (1) is in the same basket. I don’t know much of the public Google application created with it. However, it seems that Google uses angular for more than 1,500 internal projects (I cannot find its source, could you confirm?).

Finally, I figured the polymer would be used by the angular2 team to create the next ui material. Since polymer elements are reusable WebComponents, it would be nice and could explain why Google supports angular and Polymer. But it seems not

And besides all this, react in the party ...

2015 is a very innovative year for Front-End. On the other hand, it leads to serious headaches ...

If anyone has some explanations, I would be glad to hear them.

Thomas

Answer 1

Regarding Google’s intentions for Polymer vs Angular, I believe that they intend to work side by side. In their label Polymer, they explicitly say that Polymer is a library, not a framework, and that they believe that there is a clear distinction between them. They also emphasize that interoperability is a key feature of web components. It seems that you can import a web component (even those that are not built using Polymer) and use it right next to Angular, jQuery, React, or any other structure that you would prefer to create your comprehensive application logic with.

However, since Polymer is still Javascript, you can use it to create components that are complex enough to handle entire applications, such as using Santa Tracker. In this vein, I believe that the choice is left to the developer.

Answer 2

hate the fact that the polymer has not yet considered ES6.

Actually there is a third-party project that allows you to create Polymer 1.0 elements using TypeScript ES6: https://github.com/nippur72/PolymerTS