Polymer project and polymer summit 2015

Polymer is a relatively new web framework by Google designed to leverage the evolving web platform. It has just released version 1.0, previously it was 0.5, the whole project is about 1.5 year old. Polymer in its core makes use of webcomponents specification. 
Below is short overview of the platform and some notes about the Polymer summit 2015 event.


For now it provides polyfill (utilising library called webcomponentsjs) for most of its cool features in most of the browsers, but later it will probably gracefully 'dissolve' and let the native support kick in, leaving a thin API-layer to the components. Each polymer component contains set of blocks describing:

• styles of the component
• component template (shadow DOM)
• component properties and behaviour logic

All of that look as follows in a nutshell:

Polymer component structure, www.polymer-project.org

For those who have worked with AngularJS directives, ReactJS components or even Backbone Views the way how component's logic works with its template will look somehow familiar. There are just several specific properties here and there to make the stuff work - that shouldn't take long.

Polymer has a already a decent library of official components. Plus developer are contributing to create their own components.

Polymer catalog elements grouped by functional types, www.polymer-project.org

In addition to nicely prepared documentation, Polymer team (and community) provides several build tool - vulcanize and local web server - polyserve.

The Polymer summit 2015

Summit took place in Amsterdam 14-15th September. The event itself was aimed to promote the platform usage among early adopter and probably give answers to more advanced Polymer  developers. However 9 people out of 10 I have met during the event had no practical commercial experience with Polymer before and came for the event to have a first look at this emerging technology.

First day, 14th September afternoon was devoted to guided coding tutorials, where one could get hands on experience with Polymer development. But if you were 30 mins late - there was no space anymore. Those tutorials are available here: Polymer codelabs.

Polymer summit 2015 by @legkoletat

But even if you didn't allocate time to go through the code labs, several talks during the main event day were detailed and deep dives into how development with Polymer works - what nice features you get out of the box.
Some others were really general ("Using ES6 with Polymer" or "Doing a Perf Audit of your Polymer App") very well prepared however. Presentations session in the evening was wrapped up with QA panel with all polymer team.
You can find all the videos of Polymer summit 2015 presentations on Youtube.