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Comment by spankalee | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, what's keeping you from trying Polymer? Its paper-elements are a very good implementation of Material Design, and the library is very light weight.

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As someone who used polymer/paper-elements recently in a project, these are some downsides:

1. The whole design guide is not implemented (date picker for example)

2. Web components polyfill while pretty fast still slows things down a bit

3. Extra effort required to debug/style components (shadow DOM)

4. It's still fairly bleeding edge, not for the faint of heart

5. Vulcanizing required for assets to avoid hundreds of imports/requests

These are some of the factors that would make me reconsider using it on another project. It still turned out very nice for the project however.

I've used Polymer in two projects now. It's simply not ready for real production use in my opinion. Too many issues overriding / styling their components (modal is awkward as hell to style the content) and it's simply too slow on start-up. Firefox literally freezes for many seconds to load several components (chrome doesn't but it's still not very fast).

I want web components to be a thing but Polymer is not the path forward in its current state.

Tried Polymer in a recent project for a basic social webapp last month. Within 2 days we found ourselves reading github issues about to-be-released customization options - options that we needed. The basic features are present alright, but the customization options aren't enough. Integrating modals with custom scrolling, wanting more than 5 options for spacing in the header - why give yourself a hard time when materialize and foundation are waiting with their arms open?

What's keeping me from using Polymer is that nobody can tell me if Web Components is going to last. In fact, I don't know what's even in the running anymore.

I was considering using Polymer. It worked great in Chrome. Then I tried using it in Firefox. It took a whole extra 1 second longer for Polymer to bootstrap itself on every page load, even when all assets were cached.

The blog post mentions speedups in Chrome and Safari. It does not mention Firefox.

Most of my apps are built with Ember, and I just haven't quite figured out how to marry them both.

You might be interested in ember-paper and ember-cli-materialize if you are looking at Material + Ember.js

- https://github.com/miguelcobain/ember-paper

- https://github.com/truenorth/ember-cli-materialize

its just html tags?

You don't have to do anything special.

1. import polymer html file 2. use it

thats all there is to it.

This is actually not true. If you're using polymer with the full webcomponents.js polyfill, there's a known bug which breaks contenteditable execCommand calls (which means a lot of rich text editors break when you include the polyfill) [1]. The big heavy polyfill is also pretty slow on some browsers.

If you use the newer, lighter-weight shady-dom version of the polyfill, which is a lot more responsive on non-Chrome browsers and doesn't introduce the bug indicated in [1], you must do all DOM manipulation via polymer's local DOM api, in order to properly distribute dom elements.[2]

That means, if you want to use polymer, you cannot use angular or ember (for example). Specifically, DOM manipulation via those libraries ends up just using regular calls against element.appendChild, but those appended elements, if they are polymer elements, end up not properly working (event listeners don't attach and styling modifiers don't apply), because you didn't use polymer.dom to go via polymer's local dom API.

I found out about all of this the hard way, and now I have a webapp that works great on chrome, but users cannot use the rich text editor on anything except chrome. Which eliminates all iOS browsers entirely.

1: https://github.com/webcomponents/webcomponentsjs#execcommand...

2:https://www.polymer-project.org/1.0/docs/devguide/local-dom....

So, how do I pass a model into a component? Bubble an action out of it? It's the integration with Ember that I want.

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