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Polymer vs Topcoat: What are the differences?

Introduction:
Polymer and Topcoat are both popular front-end tools used for web development. However, they have key differences that set them apart. 

1. **Architecture**: Polymer is a library that helps in building reusable custom elements, while Topcoat is a set of CSS classes and Web Components for UI design.
2. **Component Library**: Polymer provides a wide range of pre-built components that can be customized, while Topcoat focuses more on providing a set of predefined UI components with minimal customization.
3. **Support for Features**: Polymer has robust support for data binding, templates, and shadow DOM, whereas Topcoat lacks these features and primarily focuses on UI styling.
4. **Browser Compatibility**: Polymer aims to ensure compatibility with all major browsers, providing polyfills for older browsers, while Topcoat might have limitations in terms of browser support due to its CSS-centric design.
5. **Community and Documentation**: Polymer has a larger community and comprehensive documentation, making it easier for developers to find resources and support, whereas Topcoat may have a smaller community and limited documentation.
6. **Performance**: Polymer's emphasis on data binding and elements may lead to slightly heavier page loads, while Topcoat's lightweight CSS classes may result in better performance for simpler UI designs.

In Summary, Polymer and Topcoat have distinct differences in their architecture, component library, support for features, browser compatibility, community support, and performance.
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Pros of Polymer
Pros of Topcoat
  • 52
    Web components
  • 30
    Material design
  • 14
    HTML
  • 13
    Components
  • 5
    Open source
  • 4
    It uses the platform
  • 3
    Designer friendly. HTMLX concepts
  • 1
    Like the interesting naming convention for elements
  • 3
    Open source
  • 3
    Backed by Adobe
  • 2
    Pretty
  • 2
    Themeable
  • 1
    BEM Architecture
  • 1
    Lightweight
  • 1
    Fast
  • 1
    Clean
  • 1
    PSD included

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Cons of Polymer
Cons of Topcoat
  • 1
    Last version is like 2 years ago? that's totally rad
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    What is Polymer?

    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.

    What is Topcoat?

    TopCoat is made up of base controls, platform specific styles, themes and a build script to stitch them all together.

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    What companies use Polymer?
    What companies use Topcoat?
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      What are some alternatives to Polymer and Topcoat?
      React
      Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.
      Angular
      It is a TypeScript-based open-source web application framework. It is a development platform for building mobile and desktop web applications.
      JavaScript
      JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
      Python
      Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.
      Node.js
      Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.
      See all alternatives