Last Updated: February 22, 2024
Polymer Vs Angular
Published On: February 22, 2024

Summary: Supported by Google, both Angular and Polymer are emerging front-end web app development frameworks. They have equal potential to match the needs of developers by ensuring a rapid application development process.

Meanwhile, it is sometimes difficult to choose the right one between these two frameworks. This blog aims to provide a detailed comparison between Angular and Polymer and help you opt for the right front-end framework. Let’s delve into the details of Polymer vs Angular.

You will, of late, come across numerous frameworks that make web development rapid and efficient. Polymer and Angular are two such frameworks that developers use most frequently for developing a range of web apps. It has increased the demand and popularity of both frameworks. 

According to Stackshare, Angular secured 49.5K GitHub stars and 13.6K forks overall, whereas Polymer secured 21.1K GitHub stars and 2K forks. Of course, the stats project Angular as a more popular framework. But, it doesn’t stop the debate on the difference between Polymer and Angular.

Though both frameworks simplify web development and improve the performance of apps, they are different in terms of their approaches and goals. Let’s reveal some interesting facts about Angular and Polymer to help you choose the right framework.

What is Polymer?

As one of the top-rated JavaScript libraries, Polymer makes the process of web application development simple and smooth. It provides developers the flexibility to encapsulate code into modular Polymer web components while promoting maintainability and reusability. 

Polymer Developers can leverage this framework to build an interactive and dynamic user interface, whether it’s simple or complex apps. When it comes to use cases of Polymer, it ranges from creating custom UI components to building entire single-page apps. 

It’s popular for being compatible and flexible with advanced web standards, which makes it an apt choice for multiple projects such as content management systems, eCommerce platforms, productivity tools, and more. It mainly emphasizes efficiency and modularity to empower developers to simplify the development process.  

Use Cases of Polymer

  • Develop customized themes and design systems.
  • Prototyping and rapid development
  • Integration with backend services
  • Creating cross-platform apps
  • Developing progressive web apps (PWAs)
  • Enhance existing web apps
  • Developing single-page apps
  • Creating custom UI components 

Polymer Application

In a Polymer application, the core building blocks are its web components, which are assembled to construct the app’s structure. These components offer reusable functionalities and handle tasks such as authentication, data retrieval, and interaction with external APIs.

Polymer applications emphasize modularity and encapsulation through custom elements, fostering flexibility and maintainability in development.

Features of Polymer

  • Polymer offers a convenient way to bind data between elements in the HTML, enabling seamless synchronization between the model and the view. 
  • With Polymer’s focus on web components, developers can create reusable custom elements encapsulating functionality and styling, promoting modularity and code reusability. 
  • Polymer leverages Shadow DOM to encapsulate styles and markup within custom elements, preventing style leakage and ensuring component isolation. 
  • Polymer provides powerful templating capabilities, allowing developers to create dynamic and responsive user interfaces efficiently. Polymer includes polyfills that ensure compatibility with older browsers, enabling developers to utilize modern web standards without worrying about unsupported features. 
  • Polymer’s efficient data binding and rendering system optimizes DOM updates, resulting in improved performance and smoother user experiences. Polymer CLI offers a suite of tools for scaffolding projects, optimizing production builds, automating common development tasks, and enhancing developer productivity. 
  • Polymer offers a collection of Material Design components that follow Google’s design guidelines, enabling developers to create visually appealing and consistent user interfaces effortlessly. 

Apps Developed With Polymer

Polymer witnessed its wider acceptance in multiple industries. As a result, several apps have been developed using this framework. Some of them are as follows. 

  • Polymer Starter Kit
  • Build My App
  • Google Play Music
  • Shop Polymer
  • Google I/O Web App 

What is Angular?

Angular is one of the well-known and open-source frameworks. Developers use it for building dynamic web apps. With the framework, they get a complete set of robust tools to develop single page apps (SPAs) and progressive web apps (PWAs).

It eases out complications of the development process by providing various features, including modular architecture, two-way data binding, and more.

Use Cases of Angular

  • Enterprise Scale Applications
  • Single Page Applications
  • Progressive Web Applications
  • Real-Time Applications

Angular Application

When it comes to Angular applications it mainly includes modules, services, web components, templates, and more. In this, web components are composed together to build the entire structure of apps.

It provides various custom elements and reusable functionalities and can also handle several tasks, including authentication, data fetching, communication with external APIs, and more. 

Features of Angular

Being a top-notch front-end web framework, Angular provides several distinct features that make it a top choice to create dynamic web apps. Let’s explore some of the top features:

  • Two-way data binding is one of the top features of Angular. It brings the possibility of automatic synchronization of data between model and view web components.
  • The modular structure is useful for building web applications with higher scalability by offering code reusability and also maintainability.
  • Dependency injection is another feature of Angular that makes component management and services less complicated. It improves flexibility and testability.
  • Angular includes built-in directives that can streamline the process of DOM manipulation. It also includes a CLI tool that can automate various common development tasks.
  • Angular boasts various other features, including vibrant community support and comprehensive documentation. It ensures an extensive resource for learning and troubleshooting.    

Apps Development With Angular

Several web applications have been developed using the power of Angular frameworks. These apps are from different industries and serve distinct purposes. The following are some of them:

  • PayPal
  • UpWork
  • Forbes
  • Gmail
  • YouTube
  • JetBlue
  • Wikiwand
  • Standard Bank

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Polymer Vs Angular

Several factors make both Polymer and Angular different from each other. You should be familiar with the major difference between Polymer and Angular to make the right choice. Let’s discuss the comparison in detail: 

1. Development Tools and Ecosystem

CLI is one of the major tools of Polymer. It provides commands for building, project scaffolding, and testing. It provides simplicity and enables developers to get started with various Polymer projects quickly. Meanwhile, the ecosystem of polymers is less extensive than that of the angular framework. 

Angular offers a full suite of development tools. Angular CLI emerges as a robust command-line interface for generating components, scaffolding, modules, and services effortlessly. Angular ecosystem includes plugins, libraries, extensions, and more. The credit goes to its vast community support for their direct contribution.

Performance optimization and testing are pivotal for web development. Polymer is available with various testing tools, including web-component-tester. It allows developers to conduct testing for web components with a higher efficiency. 

Debugging of Polymer apps can be performed with the use of browser developer tools. In Polymer, performance optimization involves multiple techniques like code splitting and lazy loading, which improve load times and minimize initial bundle size.

Being a full-fledged framework, Angular is available with powerful capabilities and several tools that include Protractor and Jasmine for end-to-end and unit testing. One can use Angular DevTools to debug Angular apps. It provides a dedicated interface for inspecting performance metrics, state, hierarchy, and more. 

The framework advocates for various performance optimization techniques, including tree shakings, Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation, lazy loading, etc., to improve the app’s performance. 

2. Scalability and Maintainability

Be it Angular or Polymer, both frameworks provide a complete mechanism for creating large-scale apps. Polymer is based on a modular approach for component-based architecture. The polymer team can encapsulate functionalities into reusable web components. 

However, management of state across components and dependencies tends to become quite challenging as apps grow.

As mentioned, the Angular framework includes several built-in features, including hierarchical dependency injection. It ensures scalability by implementing the latest practices when it comes to code organization. 

The framework includes components-based architecture that can align perfectly with those of large-scale apps. It allows developers to divide apps into different manageable chunks and also maintain a clear separation of concerns.

Maintainability is an important aspect of long-term sustainability in various software projects. Polymer ensures easy maintenance as it emphasizes mainly creating web components and also advocates for reusability. But as the framework evolves, it brings certain challenges in terms of backward compatibility and also support for old projects.

Angular, on the other hand, is known for having a stable release cycle and commits to long-term support. It provides a great foundation for creating various sustainable projects. The Angular team is capable of maintaining actively backward compatibility and ensures projects developed with older versions are also important and viable. 

Apart from this, Angular includes a powerful ecosystem and community support that can contribute to ensuring the longevity and also maintainability of projects. 

3. Performance and Optimization

As mentioned, polymer is available with lazy loading, which makes it possible for components to load only when they are required. That’s why it minimizes the initial loading times and also enhances overall responsiveness. The framework implements highly efficient bi-directional data binding techniques.

It reduces unnecessary DOM manipulation and thus improves rendering performance.

If we talk about Angular, it is primarily based on a comprehensive approach to performance optimization. It works on the core principle of AOT compilation that compiles together both templates and components during the entire development process. It results in a fast startup time with small bundle sizes. 

The framework is also available with features including code splitting and tree shaking. It lets developers remove unused code and load only the required modules to improve performance.

For rendering optimization, both Angular and Polymer include techniques like memorization and scrolling to minimize the impact of the larger data sets on UI performance. Both frameworks provide tools for gzip compression, code minification, enhance load times, minimize latency, and more 

4. Community and Support

Community and support are other factors that differentiate Angular and Polymer from each other. When it comes to Angular, it is available with the largest community with a myriad of resources and activities available for developers with varied skill levels. Developers working with Angular can use forums, tutorials, and official documentation offered by Google.

It helps them get proper guidance on everything from start to complex ones, including scalability and performance optimization. Angular community is also known for its active participation in online discussions, meetups, conferences, etc., which enhances knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Polymer, on the other hand, is a less adopted framework. However, it still has a supportive and active community that contributed a lot in terms of tools, Polymer components, Polymer library, and more for improving the ecosystem. It allows developers to create complex apps with ease.

The wider availability of various plugins, third-party libraries, extensions, and more extended functionalities of these frameworks. These improve development by offering various pre-built solutions to various common challenges.    

How is Polymer Different from Angular?

Indeed, Polymer and Angular are some of the most sought-after frameworks that are appropriate for developing web apps. However, they are different from each other.

Polymer helps developers build reusable Polymer custom elements that they can use across multiple projects. It focuses mainly on web components and a lightweight & modular approach. Polymer lets developers select the web components they require.

Developed by Google and based on the MVC framework, Angular, on the other hand, offers an opinionated structure for creating large-scale apps. It boasts numerous features such as routing, dependency injection, powerful data binding, and more.

When To Use Polymer?

Polymer is the best option for developing interactive, complex, and also various component-based projects. It provides a completely modular approach to building web applications, which enables developers to create various reusable web components that ensure styling and functionality. 

You can use Polymer js when it comes to improving scalability and performance. The reason is that it uses various web standards like Polymer components to manage DOM manipulation efficiently.

Polymer is the right option for those projects that need efficient state management and also dynamic data binding. It boasts a declarative syntax that eases out the complication of the overall process of code maintenance. With polymer, developers find it easy to improve their productivity. 

When to Use Angular?

For those aiming to develop intricate web applications with highly interactive and dynamic user interfaces, Angular stands out as the optimal choice.

If you’re considering the development of such applications, you can leverage the expertise of professional Angular developers to bring your vision to life, and you can hire skilled Angular developers who can fulfill your project requirements with precision and proficiency.

Since Angular is available with features like dependency injection, two-way data binding, modular architecture, and more, it’s a perfect choice for developing a single-page application.

Apart from this, the framework also includes an extensive ecosystem, various tools, Angular materials, and Angular CLI. These tools are helpful to make the Angular development process quick and hassle-free and thus improve the productivity of developers.  

Conclusion

In summary of Polymer Vs Angular, Angular excels in handling complex projects with interactive interfaces, while Polymer emphasizes modular development through reusable web components. Choose Angular for large-scale applications and intricate UIs and Polymer for modular projects leveraging web components. Ultimately, the decision hinges on project requirements and development preferences.

FAQs

Actually, Angular will be updated in 2024. It’s still the top choice when it comes to web development, depending on your preferences, project requirements, and goals.

React is better than Angular for several reasons, such as flexibility, learning curve, performance, and more. It includes components-based architecture that facilitates perfect code reusability and organization. It also includes virtual DOM that improves rendering efficiency.

Yes, Netflix uses Angular as a frontend framework for creating the user interface, which includes various custom elements such as a search bar, navigation bar, and video player. As one of the most powerful JavaScript libraries, it uses Angular for animation, which comes with streaming options. It allows Netflix to get a dynamic and modern feel.

Well, Angular is harder than React mainly due to its toughest learning curve and also complicated architecture. Based on an opinionated approach, Angular is a TypeScript-based JavaScript framework and needs an in-depth understanding, which makes it difficult for beginners to grasp.

Yes, NextJS is better than Angular in terms of its most promising SEO advantage to its built-in server–side rendering. Both NextJS and Angular are popular for creating web apps. So, choosing the right one between these two depends on your project requirements.
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Jayanti Katariya

Jayanti Katariya is the CEO of Moon Technolabs, a fast-growing IT solutions provider, with 18+ years of experience in the industry. Passionate about developing creative apps from a young age, he pursued an engineering degree to further this interest. Under his leadership, Moon Technolabs has helped numerous brands establish their online presence and he has also launched an invoicing software that assists businesses to streamline their financial operations.

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