Why Polymer Project (Web Components) isn't famous yet in comparison to other approach?

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It's been about a while Polymer version 2 is available out there, but

  • few people talk about it
  • few developers write about it in their blogs
  • few developers share their workflow and their experiences

Polymer Project is powered by Google, and the team seems have impeccable philosophy behind it.

Beside lack of browser support, Polyfills are doing the job still fine.

By the way, It seems people don't prefer to switch on it and work on it although Web components is an standard of the web.

There's a big why for me, there should be an explanation.

This is I think is related to Stackoverflow However I know many wouldn't like this kind of questions.

4 Answers

Even though Polymer is getting closer and closer to native Vanilla web components the fact that they are still not fully supported across all Browsers makes it not really practical to use.
I personally like the idea that this(Polymer) might end one day with a somewhat seamless transfer to native components.

What I also picked up during talks and conversations with fellow developers is that React is way bigger in the states while Developers in Europe tend to choose rather Polymer. Why exactly that is I do not really know, but I believe that there are many factors influencing it and that it can't be pinpointed to a specific disadvantage or advantage of one of these libraries.

As Supersharp already mentioned Polymer is still pretty new compared to other libraries such as Angular & React. But the developer community is growing from year to year which was especially emphasized at the last Polymer summit in Copenhagen where everything was about "The Platform". This turned out to be the community, web standards and everything around it rather than a total Polymer worship which I felt pretty pleasant.

On last thing to add.
Although, Polymer might be backed by Google the team working on it is relatively small. Youtube just switched to a 100% Polymer and what I picked up is that the team that made this happen is way bigger than the actual team developing the platform.(We are talking about a handful people here).

I use Polymer 2 for a small demo project mid 2017 (RC2, not final one), was nice and enjoyable. For my point of view, it is easier than Angular (1.6), but I don't have a lot of experience with it.

Pro

  • I like this idea of a component for each problem
  • Easy to split data (properties) and template
  • Easy use of events

Con

  • CSS rules was really intuitive

Polymer 2 Example Element

<dom-module id="input-array-element">
    <template>
        <h3>Inputs Array</h3>
        <template is="dom-repeat" items="{{technology}}">
            <input type="text" value="{{item.label::input}}">[[item.label]]<br/>
        </template><br>
    </template>
    <script>
    class InputArrayElement extends Polymer.Element {
        static get is() { return 'input-array-element'; }

        static get properties() {
            return {
                technology : {
                    type: Array,
                    value: [
                        {id:"php", label:"PHP", selected:false},
                        {id:"js", label:"Javascript", selected:false},
                        {id:"html", label:"HTML", selected:false},
                        {id:"css", label:"CSS", selected:false},
                    ],
                    notify: true
                }
            }
        }

        ready() {
            super.ready();
            this.addEventListener("technology-changed", function(e){
               console.log(e); 
            });
        }

    }

    window.customElements.define(InputArrayElement.is, InputArrayElement);        
    </script>
</dom-module>
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