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  1. Stackups
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  5. Angular 2 vs Polymer

Angular 2 vs Polymer

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Polymer
Polymer
Stacks557
Followers463
Votes122
GitHub Stars22.1K
Forks2.0K
Angular
Angular
Stacks3.8K
Followers4.8K
Votes499
GitHub Stars99.2K
Forks26.7K

Angular 2 vs Polymer: What are the differences?

What is Angular 2? One framework. Mobile & desktop. Angular is a development platform for building mobile and desktop web applications.

What is Polymer? A new library built on top of Web Components, designed to leverage the evolving web platform on modern browsers. Polymer is a new type of library for the web, designed to leverage the existing browser infrastructure to provide the encapsulation and extendability currently only available in JS libraries. Polymer is based on a set of future technologies, including Shadow DOM, Custom Elements and Model Driven Views. Currently these technologies are implemented as polyfills or shims, but as browsers adopt these features natively, the platform code that drives Polymer evacipates, leaving only the value-adds.

Angular 2 and Polymer are primarily classified as "Javascript MVC Frameworks" and "Front-End Frameworks" tools respectively.

"It's a powerful framework" is the primary reason why developers consider Angular 2 over the competitors, whereas "Web components" was stated as the key factor in picking Polymer.

Angular 2 and Polymer are both open source tools. Angular 2 with 49.5K GitHub stars and 13.6K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Polymer with 21.1K GitHub stars and 2K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Angular 2 has a broader approval, being mentioned in 259 company stacks & 237 developers stacks; compared to Polymer, which is listed in 42 company stacks and 32 developer stacks.

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Advice on Polymer, Angular

Gericke
Gericke

Jul 27, 2020

Needs adviceon.NET Core.NET CoreJavaScriptJavaScriptReactReact

Hi,

I am looking into solutions for reusable components for an existing #MVC project which is build on .NET Core. Currently some functionality is being reuses via JavaScript. I have React experience so I know I can create React components and then reference it on the MVC app. The only problem is I do not know the full extent of it as the current app uses a lot of 3rd party libraries, not sure how that will effect React components. I am currently looking into WebComponents which is also another way for creating reusable components and it is compatible with any JavaScript library based on what I have seen on the website. Also to take in consideration that it should cause a re-write of the system.

So my question is, to future-proof reusable components, which will be best React or Web Components? And which will be more reliable to use with 3rd party libraries?

49.1k views49.1k
Comments
Dennis
Dennis

CTO at Prepaid-Hoster

May 17, 2020

Decided

I was first sceptical about using Angular over AngularJS. That's because AngularJS was so easy to integrate in existing websites. But building apps from scratch with Angular is so much easier. Of course, you have to build and boilerplate them first, but after that - you save a ton of time. Also it's very cozy to write code in TypeScript.

181k views181k
Comments
Kyle
Kyle

Web Application Developer at Fortinet

Oct 16, 2019

Decided

When deciding on a front end framework to build my bitcoin faucet project, I knew I needed something battle hardened, dependedable, but also feature filled and ready to go out of the box.

While I've written some smaller apps with ng2+, I've never gone full tilt with it so I knew there were still some things to learn, and most importantly: how to do them properly, such as proper component architecture and breaking old habbits from ng1.

I didn't opt for React in this case, simply due to the need to stack more and more things on top of it to do what I'd need it to do. I wanted a framework that was going to take over routing and execution of complex UI controls, and keep items outside of a component's scope updated and react to events. This framework needed a comprehensive event emission system, data acquisition and handling, bi-directional data binding, state, and a series of things that you'd need to install separately for React to match up to what's already in the box with Angular.

I opted to stick to Angular instead of Vue for the fact that Angular also already has it's entire build system ready to go and comprehensivly built to deliver the tiniest version of it's deliverable. I was hosting this thing in a google cloud instance, so I needed to make sure the app stayed as small as possible, and could automatically trim out the cruft. This is where Angular's built in Tree Shaking took precedence for me.

Vue is more than capable of handling everything I'd need, and it was something I took serious considerion of. For instance, Vue poweres Cointiply, another bitcoin faucet application that's highly reactive and high componentized just like I wanted.

But I'd still need to learn Vue, I'd still need to configure it's build system, and I still wanted to use SCSS and TypeScript.

So Angular it was. ng8 is a great platform for building very complex user interfaces, and has many of the problems you'd inevitably face integrating a user interface to an application already figured out, and complete with a best practice recommendation.

React and Vue, given enough time and energy, are super capable platforms. No one can deny that. Angular's "A-Z Batteries Included" approach to the whole development process is what made it especially enticing this time.

55.4k views55.4k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Polymer
Polymer
Angular
Angular

Polymer is a new type of library for the web, designed to leverage the existing browser infrastructure to provide the encapsulation and extendability currently only available in JS libraries. Polymer is based on a set of future technologies, including Shadow DOM, Custom Elements and Model Driven Views. Currently these technologies are implemented as polyfills or shims, but as browsers adopt these features natively, the platform code that drives Polymer evacipates, leaving only the value-adds.

It is a TypeScript-based open-source web application framework. It is a development platform for building mobile and desktop web applications.

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Progressive Web Apps; Native; Code Generation; Code Splitting
Statistics
GitHub Stars
22.1K
GitHub Stars
99.2K
GitHub Forks
2.0K
GitHub Forks
26.7K
Stacks
557
Stacks
3.8K
Followers
463
Followers
4.8K
Votes
122
Votes
499
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 52
    Web components
  • 30
    Material design
  • 14
    HTML
  • 13
    Components
  • 5
    Open source
Cons
  • 1
    Last version is like 2 years ago? that's totally rad
Pros
  • 109
    It's a powerful framework
  • 53
    Straight-forward architecture
  • 48
    TypeScript
  • 45
    Great UI and Business Logic separation
  • 40
    Powerful, maintainable, fast
Cons
  • 9
    Overcomplicated
  • 9
    Large overhead in file size and initialization time
  • 2
    CLI not open to other test and linting tools
  • 2
    Ugly code
Integrations
No integrations available
Bugsnag
Bugsnag
Firebase
Firebase
Sentry
Sentry
Socket.IO
Socket.IO

What are some alternatives to Polymer, Angular?

Bootstrap

Bootstrap

Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web.

AngularJS

AngularJS

AngularJS lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It lets you use good old HTML (or HAML, Jade and friends!) as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. It automatically synchronizes data from your UI (view) with your JavaScript objects (model) through 2-way data binding.

Vue.js

Vue.js

It is a library for building interactive web interfaces. It provides data-reactive components with a simple and flexible API.

Ember.js

Ember.js

A JavaScript framework that does all of the heavy lifting that you'd normally have to do by hand. There are tasks that are common to every web app; It does those things for you, so you can focus on building killer features and UI.

Foundation

Foundation

Foundation is the most advanced responsive front-end framework in the world. You can quickly prototype and build sites or apps that work on any kind of device with Foundation, which includes layout constructs (like a fully responsive grid), elements and best practices.

Backbone.js

Backbone.js

Backbone supplies structure to JavaScript-heavy applications by providing models key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing application over a RESTful JSON interface.

Semantic UI

Semantic UI

Semantic empowers designers and developers by creating a shared vocabulary for UI.

Materialize

Materialize

A CSS Framework based on material design.

Material Design for Angular

Material Design for Angular

Material Design is a specification for a unified system of visual, motion, and interaction design that adapts across different devices. Our goal is to deliver a lean, lightweight set of AngularJS-native UI elements that implement the material design system for use in Angular SPAs.

Material-UI

Material-UI

Material UI is a library of React UI components that implements Google's Material Design.

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