Goodnight Polymer Project

With the release of Lit 2.0, the Polymer Project has entered maintenance mode. The project was a push forward for web components by a team at Google, and came with a pretty high quality set of Material components. The world of web components look a lot different now than they did six years ago, and we probably have a lot of that thanks to the Polymer Project.

While I never got to use Polymer in production at my current job, I did get to experiment with it a good deal. Sadly, our mobile platform at the time was BB10, and it didn’t support enough modern browser features to get Polymer to work, but it was my first glimpse into the future of the web. Years later, our production work targets Angular, a framework which can actually generate web components as an output.

Anyway, the announcement that the library has entered maintenance mode and will be succeeded by Lit has me a bit nostalgic.

Story time! Years ago I had interviewed for a developer position at a company in Japan. This was a pretty exciting time in my life, and really there were two paths that I could have ended up going down.

During this interview process, as often happens to the bane of prospective hires, I was asked to create a demo project. I loathe these kinds of projects, but this job opportunity was one I really wanted. I begrudgingly began to work on the problem. To make it a more productive experience, I figured I would take Polymer for a spin, even if the library wasn’t quite production ready at the time. I remember hitting a few snags, but ultimately ended up completing the product with something that felt okay.

The following reviews were not something I was prepared for though. I had fully embraced the “everything is a component” mindset, but this was before that was commonplace. JQuery and AngularJS ruled the JavaScript world, and having what were traditionally service type objects, like routing, as components didn’t jive with my interviewers. For better or worse it didn’t work out.

I really did feel like I was using the future when I was working with Polymer, and now that future is raw web components and Lit. If anything, the end of Polymer was a nice trip down memory lane.