“There is an <element> for that”
Experiences from the Polymer Summit 2015
Yesterday, I went to the first Polymer Summit ever. It was not just my first trip to Amsterdam, it was also the first developer conference I attended. And I have to say it was an extremely interesting experience. I’m an AngularJS developer for over a year now and I was pretty curious about the Polymer project and the ambitious ideas behind it. It turned out that Google is taking Polymer very serious although AngularJS — which is also pushed by Google — wants to achieve something similar.
For those who don’t know: Polymer is library (not a framework!) that allows to create and use web components. Web components are a new web standard that utilize Custom Elements, HTML Imports, the <template> Element and the Shadow DOM. The composition of these four features allows to create simple, reusable and interoperable HTML elements with isolated styles and completely custom behavior. Web components are framework-agnostic, which means you can utilize Polymer in conjunction with every framework you like; let it be AngularJS, React or Whatever-Framework-Is-Next. The interoperability is achieved because web components are based on the same declarative objects as builtin HTML elements. As with many web standards, every browser has a different implementation progress. Therefore, a small webcomponent-lite polyfill is required to provide support across all browsers. Hopefully, it is just a matter of time to get rid of this polyfill.
Google picked a prominent venue for the Summit. The Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ (that’s a pronunciation exercise!) is a huge cubic structure housing a cubic auditorium in the inside. The structure is located on a dock facing water from three sides which opens a stunning 270° panorama view through the glass facade. You can see the city center, the Amsterdam Centraal (train station) and many boats passing by. I really enjoyed the atmosphere there. You met web gurus and passionate engineers at every corner. The high presence of MacBooks and cutting-edge wearables underlined this impression. Some folks even walked around with mounted GoPro’s or wearing Google Glass. It was a group of early adopters, technology enthusiastic individuals who strongly believe in the web platform and even step up to define its future.
The slides at all talks were impressive — they contained beautiful typography, amusing images, delight animations and helpful annotations. The speakers either spend a significant amount of time for preparation or they had professional assistance. However, the result was informative, insightful and entertaining — just as the speakers! I have a number of talks I definitely recommend checking out if you want to know more about Polymer. The first three talks Opening Keynote by Taylor Savage, Thinking in Polymer by Kevin Schaaf and End to End with Polymer by Rob Dodson provided a perfect intro for the summit and everybody who considers using Polymer. Another great talk was about Accessibility with Polymer by Alice Boxhall & Laura Palmaro. Getting accessibility issues explained from a visually impaired person was insightful and authentic - it helped to really understand the challenges. Last but not least, the talk Polymer Power Tools by Addy Osmani is strongly recommended. Addy is well-known in the Web and JavaScript community for his expertise. Besides that, he is a talented speaker and definitely knows how to entertain an audience.
Polymer recently had its third birthday and you can see it is maturing. Not just from the 1.0 version tag. It also comes with a big ecosystem of tools to ease creation, composition, testing and shipping. Here is a short list of the most important tools every Polymer developer should be aware of:
- polyup Automatically upgrades your Polymer 0.5 elements to Polymer 1.0 (manual migration might still be necessary)
- polygit Allows versioning, releasing, deploying and shipping your elements to a CDN
- polylint Provides the ability to lint Polymer elements and detect code smells
- polydev Chrome DevTools extension to assist with Polymer development
- polybuild Utilizes vulcanize, crisper, and polyclean to make your Polymer app ready for production
- polyserve Serve your Polymer elements and apps locally
- polysearch Chrome extension that allows to search for Polymer elements from the omnibox
- polymer ready Chrome Extension to show if and what Polymer elements are used on a website
You can easily tell that Google is investing considerably in Polymer. First of all, Polymer is part of the Web Platform team at Google. The Polymer team itself consists of very passionate and talented individuals aiming for a modular, more accessible and more performant web. Second, the Summit itself was a huge investment in terms of organization if you think of preparation, branding, merchandise, catering, and many more aspects. They took care that everybody feels comfortable. Important to note that the Summit even had a Code of Conduct.
Furthermore, they provided social media constantly with footage, live streamed the event and uploaded individual videos to YouTube right after each talk. Everything was realized in a professional way which amazed me. There were actually just two things that could be improved for the next summit:
- The registration took quite long on Monday evening. You had to wait in three lines one after another to receive your badge, make the registration and grab the merch. I think this could be easily resolved by optimizing the process.
- The other pain point was the overloaded WiFi which resulted in slow and unstable connections.
Google uses Polymer already in very different products. It was used to build the the Google I/O 15 website or the Polymer Summit website. But customer facing services like Google Patents are also using it. Very interesting is that Google Chrome will take advantage of Polymer for the Download page, the PDF viewer and soon also the Settings page.
I’m excited to see all these standards being implemented and utilized across the industry. The Polymer community seems to grow fast and hopefully I soon find the time to create my own elements and Polymer apps.
Thank you Polymer team for this awesome summit!
Sebastian offers IT coaching and consulting at synsugar. He’s passionate about web technologies and likes to contribute to open source. Connect with him via @s_henneberg or @synsugarIT.
