Creating a Lightsaber with Polymer

developers.google.com

13 points·Everlag··6 comments

I can't be the only person who's had just about enough of these cross-promotions. We get it. There's a new movie. I almost feel like not watching it out of protest for how over saturated the advertising has been.

It's not a movie, it's a marketing event.

Fun app, but it's like they chose all the buzzwordy tech from two years ago that frontend devs no longer use. Bower? Jade? Gulp? CoffeeScript? Polymer?

And for what? The mobile page is just a single button with an accelerometer listener and websockets / webrtc glue, it shouldn't need any of those. The desktop page is mostly Three.js for loading and rendering the textures, and also the communication with the phone. What advantage does Polymer have over just writing normal ThreeJS and some vanilla js?

What do devs use instead then? React/(ES6|TS)/jspm/System.js?

Not necessarily. It's just funny that they're bragging about choosing these particular technologies when they've all fallen out of favor in the last year and a half or so. Odd to see in a tech demo writeup like this.

My point (downvotes aside) is that Polymer (or any UI library -- react, angular, whatever) is overkill for this type of application. Without digging too deep into their source, it seems like it could've been done easier and cleaner in vanilla JS and ThreeJS.

How does this site stop the tap on the top of the screen / title bar of safari from scrolling up to the top? Rather irritating.

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