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Comment by bezzi | Hacker News Reader

This framework seems very interesting, I wonder why it didn't become popular outside of Google

It is popular outside of google:

ING, USA Today, IBM, General Electric, Comcast, Net-A-Porter, BBVA, Coca-Cola, Electronic Arts - one of the biggest players in their industries.

For a while there in the .5 to .8 days performance was pretty iffy, and the documentation was lacking (as was expected for a library pre-1.0), but it seemed that was when a lot of bloggers picked it up, compared it to react/angular, then dropped it.

And back then when I was trying it out there wasn't any easy way to integrate webpack (or something like it) which made it difficult as I've gotten very used to a good bundler/compiler.

Yeah... I remember those days. The first projects I built with it were 0.5. The migration to 0.8 was... painful. But given the huge performance improvements it was worth it.

As you said, you kinda just have to expect a little pain pre-1.0. But the time investment in learning and using it has been worth it in my opinion.

I've found it's still pretty difficult to integrate with Webpack because pretty much all of the components use bower instead of npm. I've been having success with https://github.com/aitoroses/vulcanize-loader although re-running vulcanize every time components change is not fast, and I can't get it to work with Hot Module Reloading. Maybe the Webpack story will get better with Polymer 2.0

I think it's mostly due to browser support and developer awareness of Web Components. Chrome has native support (of course) for the four main technologies needed for Web Components, but other browsers are starting to catch on. In the meantime you need a few Polyfills to get full support, which is not ideal.

The support graph is starting to look a lot better, though: https://jonrimmer.github.io/are-we-componentized-yet/

Safari has shipped 2/4 of them already with the Custom Elements v1 spec currently in the Safari Tech Preview and turned on by default. https://webkit.org/blog/7027/introducing-custom-elements/

Sure, but look at it this way - with other solutions like lets say React their virtual dom is your "polyfill". Even with polyfills polymer is MUCH smaller than react core ;-) I don't see it as a problem as I've created elements that worked in IE10+ with it.

Oh I definitely agree with you. We've worked on projects with Angular 1/2, React/Redux, and Polymer and Polymer is, for me personally at least, the nicest to work with. I have grown to really like TypeScript since working in React land on recent projects but I'm excited because Polymer 2.0 will be [easily] TS compatible. Best of both worlds, I think.

React's virtual DOM has a far smaller performance impact than the web components polyfills have...

You with your FUD again, dbmon benchmarks say otherwise.

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