polymer

Polymer is a library that has played an important role in the framework of the Web Components standard. It has been a test bench through which the Javascript standard itself has been able to evolve.

Polymer started life even before Web Components materialized in the current standard. Polymer 1 was built on top of the version of Web Components that was called “V0” (Version Zero). Many developers had the opportunity to approach the standards under construction and demonstrate that it was viable to create applications closer to native Javascript, without the need for large libraries that present abstractions of a proprietary component model.

Polymer 2 later became the test bed for the now closed Web Components V1 standard, which has been adopted by browsers. However, some of his workflow proposals were finally discarded, due to lack of support from the community and browser manufacturers. Specifically, Bower was removed as a dependency manager, replacing it with npm, and the “HTML imports” were changed to Javascript imports. This is how Polymer 3 was born.

Finally, once the Web Components standard has been fully adopted by browsers, Polymer has evolved into a product capable of collecting all the improvements of Web Components and the new versions of CSS and Javascript, in , much lighter in weight and with significantly higher performance.