Google Plan: Polymer & Angular

Question

As the Google IO just ended and Google just released Polymer 1.0, I am more and more lost regarding the Google intentions.

I am developer in a little team (5-6) and we are trying to find the best framework/library for our next project.

Google released Angular.js few years ago and it was nice, but the learning curve was high and the maintainability of a medium/big project was a nightmare. Today, angular2 is in alpha and already very criticized. I have tried it to do a todoapp (hourliert/angular2-firetodo) linked to a firebasedb and I liked it but it is very verbose compared to aurelia (check the last post on durandal blog).

At the moment, I am doing a (little) webapp using the new polymer. I hate the fact that polymer didn't consider ES6 yet. But I have to say that it is nice (even in ES5) to use it. It feels very rigorous.

My question is, why doesn't Google use polymer for more public application (I know only these polymer app: Google Music, Translate community, Google IO 2015, that's it ?). It seems angular (1) is in the same basket. I don't know lot of Google public application built with it. However, It seems Google uses Angular for more 1500 internals projects (I can't find the source of it, could you confirm ?).

Finally, I believed that, polymer would be used by angular2 team to build the next material ui. As polymer elements are reusable WebComponents, it would have been nice and could have explained why Google maintains Angular & Polymer. But it seems not

And in addition of all of this, react is in the party...

2015 is a very innovative year for Front-End. On the other side, it gives sone serious headaches...

If someone have some explanations, I would be glad to hear them.

Thomas

Answer 1

Regarding Google's intentions for Polymer vs Angular, I believe they intend for them to work side-by-side. In their Polymer keynote they expressly say that Polymer is a library, not a framework, and that they believe there is a solid distinction between the two. They also stress that interoperability is a key feature of Web Components. The vision seems to be that you can import a Web Component (even those not built with Polymer) and use it right alongside Angular, jQuery, React, or whatever other framework you would prefer to build your overarching application logic with.

That said, because Polymer is still Javascript, you can use it to build components complex enough to handle entire applications, such as they did with their Santa Tracker. In that vein I believe the choice is left to the developer.