CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptwebpolymerweb-componentlit
HMR
HMR

Reputation: 39270

Web components community polymer web components

If I look at the polymer shop I am instantly sold on wanting to use this as a starter for my web shop. Not just because it's already a web shop (full pwa technology) but because it has excellent (offline) experience on browser/mobile, has proper documentation and is still maintained.

But then look at the polymer home page and see the project is based on an outdated polymer version and even the fact that it's using polymer in the first place is curious:

The Polymer library is in maintenance mode. For new development, we recommend Lit.

So my question is if lit will have the rich choice of web components that the shop seems to be depending on?

This may be a dumb question but I skipped polymer other than looking at some exciting news in google IO

Upvotes: 0

Views: 219

Answers (1)

Keith
Keith

Reputation: 155662

The goal of Lit, and of Polymer before it, is to help build web components and applications using browser features as much as possible.

For instance jQuery wrapped all the different browser features in it's own syntax, to the point where developers were learning jQuery, rather than Javascript. jQuery components assume that you have jQuery and rely on those jQuery methods to function.

Both Lit and Polymer championed web components - this makes each component much more self-contained. Using a mix of jQuery and any of its competitors was really painful, but that isn't the case here.

All the components used to build that shop are stable and still on npm. You can use them if you want and I have live applications that still use them.

However, championing the latest browser features has its risks. Polymer relied heavily on HTML Imports (that only Chrome ever implemented and were ultimately dropped) and its own template library. It was ultimately ported to ES6 modules, but the core design is far less suited to it. Those components are pretty stable, but you don't really want to start anything new with it.

Lit is quite a lot less opinionated than Polymer, and much lower level. For instance Polymer supported two way binding with {{property}} syntax, but had to make assumptions (that often broke) about what you were doing to support it. Lit drops that for extremely stable property setters but if you want to users to write values you have to subscribe to events and roll that yourself (Lit does make events very easy to manage though).

So if you're going to build your own web components or application Lit is by far the better choice, and LitElement is lightweight and extremely compatible with everything else. You can use those Polymer shop components in Lit (I have) but for most of them there are newer alternatives, in particular MWC.

Upvotes: 2

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