Polymer is a top-of-the-line JavaScript library from Google, built on top of W3C's Web Components specification

May 29, 2015 08:36 GMT  ·  By

Staying true to its word, Google I/O 2015 delivered lots of things developers can look forward to, but none as promising as Polymer, a JavaScript library built following W3C's Web Components specification for creating reusable and inter-operable HTML widgets.

A day before Google I/O 2015, the Polymer team released version 1.0 on GitHub without a proper changelog or announcement. This was strange, but what we didn't know is that a special presentation was in store at the conference itself, and the changes brought were truly worthy of the main show.

With a totally re-written codebase that's 30% smaller than the previous beta, the new Polymer library also manages to be 3 times faster on Chrome browsers and even 4 times faster on Safari.

Polymer Elements and the Polymer Starter Kit will boost the library's adoption rate

Putting the focus on speed and ease of use, Polymer also comes with a collection of ready-made components that can be browsed, previewed, and downloaded on the Polymer Elements Catalog section of the Polymer homepage.

These will not only let programmers reduce development time by having a set of UI elements in place out of the get-go, but with the help of the Polymer Starter Kit, they can easily kick off a basic, production-ready Polymer app within minutes.

The Polymer Starter Kit is basically a boilerplate Web application containing basic UI components, a complete build chain, testing tools, and support for quick theming. The kit also comes with support for mobile devices and responsive layouts, Material Design, live-reloading, and compatibility with any other JavaScript framework.

As it stands, Polymer looks to be the next big thing in Web development, and we have the same warm, fuzzy feeling about it as we had about Material Design, AngularJS, Google Web Toolkit, Go, the Google App Engines, and many other Google dev tools.

The Polymer Starter Kit is a basic Web app boilerplate for Polymer projects
The Polymer Starter Kit is a basic Web app boilerplate for Polymer projects

Polymer is Google's latest dev tool (3 Images)

Google releases Polymer 1.0, first stable version
The Polymer library comes with a collection of ready-made UI componentsThe Polymer Starter Kit is a basic Web app boilerplate for Polymer projects
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