Announced at I/O 2013, and after being incubated for a couple of years and going through a major overhaul, Google has finally released Polymer 1.0 as production ready. It includes elements for working with Google services, material design, animations, and others.
Google defines Polymer as a library for building standard web components that can be used anywhere on the web and with any other web framework. Polymer comes with a Catalog of elements, some old, some brand new:
- Fe (Iron) – basic visual and non-visual elements for scaffolding apps: iron-ajax, iron-collapse, iron-form, iron-icon, iron-input, iron-pages, etc.
- Md (Material design) – elements implementing Google’s Material Design: paper-button, paper-dialog, paper-fab, paper-menu, and many others.
- Go (Google) – wrapping each major Google Service API as an element, resulting in a Services SDK for the web, providing support for accessing and working with the their services: Analytics, APIs, Calendar, Charts, Feeds, Map, Sign-in, Street view, YouTube and others.
- Au (Gold) – elements for implementing online store check out, for dealing with fields usually appearing on check out pages: credit cards, CVC numbers, email address, phone number, zip code, etc.
- Ne (Neon) – elements dealing with animation: sliding, ripple, scaling, fading, cascading, etc.
- Pt (Platinium) – elements encapsulating modern web functionality: caching, offline, workers, notifications, etc.
- Mo (Molecules) – custom elements created by users.
In an attempt to show that Polymer is production ready, Google mentioned examples of companies using it for creating their own components used in real-life products: Atavist – story telling components, Vaadin – grids and charts for large data sets, and Salesforce – wraps their public APIs within custom components. Google is also using Polymer internally, a few examples being: Translate Community, Play Music Store (work in progress), YouTube – mobile app built on custom components (not yet public), Santa Tracker, Google I/O 2015.
According to Google, much emphasis was placed on speed and size, Polymer 1.0 being 3x times faster than 0.5 on Chrome and 4x faster on Safari/iOS. The gzip file can be as small as 19KB, up to 42KB if everything is included.
Google has also made available the Polymer Starter Kit, an SDK for the web containing components, integrated build and test tools, and themes. The kit comes with support for minification, responsive and material design, and generating apps that work offline.