Software development constantly moves over cycles of modifications and upgrades, specifically on the front-end side. Front-end development modifies so fast that it can be bewildering trying to compete with. Staying informed on the trends is an important step in developing the latest and most attractive product.

A trend originates from a major industry player wielding new technology, frameworks, or techniques. Front-end engineers ensure dynamic user interface enhancements, powerful extensibility, and better user experience. It is vital for companies to stay competitive in their market.

This is essential when we discuss the future of front-end development and assess the possibilities of each trend. JavaScript stays relevant and front-end development community continues to build and improve upon existing libraries and frameworks in digital communities.

Introduction to Polymer JS

Polymer JS is an open source JavaScript library to develop web applications using web components. Google developers created this library and it is available on GitHub. Polymer JS is developed to reproduce the functionalities established on the web platform for the development of components.  It is the best library to familiarize interactive application structuring by organizing components.

Google services and many other platforms are traditionally using this library. Polymer JS is gaining more popularity in the market. It is seemingly attributed to its structured design procedures of the components. The supposed reason is that they have strengthened support for web components. They have outstanding offline modules in comparison with React.

Key Features of Polymer: Why It Stands Out

Polymer JS library is developed with quality web standards API. It provides the ability to create custom HTML elements.

  • It uses polyfils web components specifications, which allows developing your own customized and reusable modules.
  • You can automatically check updates using the feature of computed properties with a computed value modification.
  • Developers can create responsive designs using the app layout feature.
  • It supports faster and simple development of hybrid applications, as well as creating gesture events.

Polymer design includes a set of visual and nonvisual elements. It was created to work with the layout, selection, user interaction, and frame applications. They include various components such as a simple button, clear visual effects, a dialog box, and others. The following information includes different types of polymer elements.

  • App elements: The app elements are beneficial when creating entire applications.
  • Iron elements: They are the fundamental building blocks to develop an application.
  • Paper elements: These are a set of UI components aimed at implementing the material design guidelines of Google.
  • Gold elements: These elements are specifically developed for e-commerce related cases.
  • Platinum elements: These elements offer features to turn your web page into a true web app.
  • Neon elements: They use web animations for implementing animated transitions for polymer elements.
  • Google web components: They are related to a stock of web components for APIs & services of Google.
  • Molecule Elements: The molecule element helps to develop an application easily. They are used to link a group of plugins to the polymer application.

Do You Need an offshore frontend development team for Polymer JS?

Polymer is aimed at promoting the use and creation of web components including customized HTML tags. It is not a framework but more of a library similar to jQuery. Polymer JS allows you to easily create web components. You have to invest your resources and time to learn & develop components using Polymer.

Various companies are still looking to hire front end developers for their systems. Experts believe that Polymer will be gone very soon. But most developers are still sticking to it as their default or go to front end development library. Polymer JS promotes the use of the original platform of the web; the browser.

The browser still features tools for developers to create custom, dynamic, and modular web components. It doesn’t require additional build tools to mirror the DOM tree for DOM operation. You can develop your web components as it extends the abilities of HTML Element.

Challenges and Limitations

  • Polymer JS enables developers to create components and prepare them for writing plugins in JavaScript. It will provide freedom to create according to desire of people. But the entire process consumes significant time to create components for every browser.
  • It stores everything in elements and will discard the unnecessary codes automatically. But it features slow performance when operated using mobile devices. Mobile devices don’t have powerful JS engine compared to the web.
  • Polymer JS reduces the space between the developer and the designer. But it is unable to work with Internet Explorer.
  • It confirms a work balance between the web page UX and web page functionality. Developers can’t change complex web page source to arrange with the requirements of designers. There is not any confirmation how developers use Polymer JS to organize larger applications.
  • Polymer JS is four times faster on Safari and three times faster when used with Chrome. It offers developers an easy way to create powerful applications and websites. But it requires download of Polyfills and the entire library.

The Future of Polymer: Predictions and Speculations

Polymer JS is a gateway to the future of easily creating web components using the platform. It helps developers practice on creating web components using the existing API of the browser.

Polymer features a heavy set of requirements on the browser. It depends on various technologies that are continuously in the process of regularization but not present in the currently used browsers.

Moreover, Polymer JS recommends Polyfills created in a way that are supposedly flawless to supersede after the availability of the native browser version of these abilities.

Conclusion

Polymer JS is an attractive and powerful technology. But it is supposedly in the development stage without the availability of fully functional components. You can’t depend on the development of larger enterprise applications. But the story will change completely after it gets complete functions.

Polymer needs a relatively considerable level of expertise for using browser technologies, such as the DOM. Developers are returning in many ways and learning the DOM API to perform simple tasks including removing or adding a CSS class from a Polymer element.

You will discover various available tutorials and guides explaining the working and functionalities of Polymer JS. Moreover, Polymer JS provides some convincing arguments with the existence of opposition. You have to wait and see how it is going to function.