Angular Vs. Polymer: A Face-Off For The Throne Of Frontend Development

At the moment, both Angular and Polymer are leading technologies for the frontend work of app development. Both platforms have different aspects to cater to for development purposes. Understandably, selecting the right one can be quite a challenge. Polymer is a JavaScript library, while Angular is an open-source framework perfect for developing web applications. This write-up highlights the key features of Angular and Polymer to give you a complete picture.
 
When an angular app development company works on an app development project, the professionals prioritize designing an intuitive and unique UI. However, it’s easy to talk about it, but things become difficult when handling the project. Selecting the appropriate frontend tech requires an in-depth understanding of how various platforms function and how you can leverage the specialities of those platforms for your project.
 
If you think you’re going to explore the documentation of every available tech, look into their pros and cons, scrutinize the way different organizations used them, you should forget about it. There’s no way to do it. Then again, you shouldn’t worry about it because you have this write-up at your disposal.
 
Here you’ll find an in-depth comparison between two rivalling~ frontend technologies – Polymer and Angular. The comparison will be on various grounds forming the base of every project of web app development. Both platforms have multiple approaches to development, and by the end of this write-up, you’ll have a clearer picture of your needs that you can satisfy with the right solution.
 

About Angular

If you ask an angular app development company, the experts working there will describe Angular as a typescript-based JavaScript framework that can help businesses develop scalable web applications by migrating into a native app using angular. This standalone frontend framework comes with an inbuilt toolkit and libraries that will never affect the size or speed of an application. It offers development opportunities over several platforms due to reusable code that will be of use for every deployment target. It even has a dynamic UI binding at a simple property or object level, along with a two-way data binding fundamental to its architecture.
 

Researched Data:

• According to experts, Angular makes up for 0.4% of all websites designed using the JavaScript library.

 

• Only a few sites use Angular, but most of them get a lot of traffic.

 

• On GitHub, Angular has 72,600 stars, 19,000 forms, and almost 1300 contributors. It even boasts of having a storehouse of 1.7 million users.

 

• Around 16.1% of all developers in the world use Angular.

What Angular can do?

If you hire angular developers, they can build the following applications for you.
 

 

The pros and cons:

—) Advantages of using Polymer:

(1) A developer can utilize the functionality of custom element creation to compose CSS, HTML, and JS as custom elements.
 
(2) Polymer comes with structured and properly maintained documentation as opposed to Angular/React. It proves significantly advantageous when bringing in new developers to an existing team.
 
(3) Polymer supports one-way and two-way data binding. With the second functionality, developers can make changes in both downward and upward directions between host elements, as well as DOM elements. Naturally, data updates will take place between the target elements and the host automatically.
 
(4) The architecture of Polymer doesn’t include any extra security layer. That’s why developers connect to third-party libraries, such as Chart.js, Mathjax, d3js, and more to build applications without any hassle.
 

—) Disadvantages of Polymer:

(1) Polymer doesn’t offer a clear explanation as to how a developer can leverage its specialities to organize and build large-scale applications. If you hire angular developers and ask them to work on a large-scale application using Polymer, they will disagree with you.
 
(2) Developers often find it difficult to understand the web component structure of Polymer and introduce necessary changes in their coding styles. Naturally, they rewrite the codes and spend a lot of time testing the same for bugs. In the long run, this problem affects the overall timeline of the projects and causes unnecessary delays.
 
(3) Polymer users often complain about its below-par performance standards in mobile applications. If most of your digital products are on mobile devices, you should reconsider your choice.
 

—) Advantages of Angular:

(1) JavaScript’s superset offers enhanced navigation, refactoring services, and auto-complete. These features work together to eliminate all errors within code while allowing the developer to work on enterprise-scale applications.
 
(2) Angular delivers incredibly high performance to the developers ensured by the hierarchical dependency injection, AOT compiler, Angular Universal support, differential loading, and Ivy renderer.
 
(3) Angular has long-term support from Google further backed with detailed documentation. There’s also a possibility that the framework will expand and receive enhanced developmental features in the future.
 
(4) Angular is one such framework that facilitates easy integration of third-party applications, which, in turn, offers more flexibility and tools for the progress of development.
 
(5) The command-line interface of Angular provides recommendations needed for loaders, dependencies, and plug-ins now and then.
 
(6) All modules and elements of Angular can accommodate integration from other frameworks. Developers can even customize things depending on their requirements. It’s also possible for them to reuse and manage the HTML elements of Angular by wrapping them as a DOM element.
 

—) Disadvantages of Angular:

(1) Shifting from AngularJS to Angular can be problematic for developers. The difficulties increase when the framework application is too large. Besides, just shifting from one to the other isn’t going to be enough. A developer has the learn how to use Angular if he/she transitions to it from AngularJS, and the associated learning curve is going to be steep.
 
(2) Even after having a component-based architecture, managing those components and associated repetitiveness make the frontend framework wordy for the development community.

(3) Due to the requirements of abstractions, boilerplate codes and other bundled features, even the simplest and smallest applications tend to get bloated.
 

In terms of performance:

—) Polymer

The performance standard of an app is a crucial factor while developing a web application. In that regard, Polymer introduced lit-HTML v1.0 and LitElement v2.0. The former serves as a swift and lightweight HTML template library, while the latter is a JS library used for creating lightweight web components. The ultimate objective of both libraries is to augment the performance of an app with web components that a developer can use with or without app development frameworks.
 

—) Angular

For high-performance frameworks, Angular already managed to prove itself by facilitating enhanced performance. Ivy renderer bestows power upon the framework, which is a rewritten version of Angular’s rendering engine. It can make applications faster and more compact for unparalleled performance and compile components that further reduce the time required for the development.
 

In terms of ease of testing:

—) Polymer

The creators of Polymer developed an end-to-end testing environment. They call it the Web Component Tester. It has all the functionalities of a third-party testing tool, such as Sinon, Chai, Mocha, Selenium, and more. This feature negates the hassle of learning how to use a new tool.
 

—) Angular

For the providers of angular development services, testing is an imperative part of the framework itself. Also, all the JavaScript codes in Angular have to pass a series of tests. The convenience offered by Angular in terms of testing allows developers to work on a project from scratch and test every component seamlessly.
 

In terms of architecture:

—) Polymer

Polymer developers don’t have to adhere to any specific structure as its main function is to build the web components for an application. There are four interconnected layers in the internal architecture of Polymer.
 

• The foundation has polyfills and they add features to browsers not natively included in the same.

 

• The native contains all essential features available natively on browsers.

 

• The elements consist of a basic set that acts as building blocks for developers to build applications.

 

• The core provides the required infrastructure to explore the features offered by the foundation and native layers.

—) Angular

There is a Model-View-Controller architecture in Angular that isolates the logic of the app from the UI layer and supports the separation of concerns effectively. This architecture further helps to organize the components of the code according to design and performance-related differences. It even simplifies the development structure by combining the MVC pattern and two-way data binding.
 

In terms of scalability:

—) Polymer

Owing to the block structure of Polymers, developers can add new code blocks to the structure to scale an app up or down without altering previous codes. Most of the recognized and used browsers also support Polymer, which improves the possibility of achieving app compatibility. In short, it’s perfectly possible to build scalable frontend apps with Polymer.
 

—) Angular

Due to continuous support from Google and other world-renowned corporations, Angular is an all-inclusive framework that the providers of angular development services can use to create enterprise-level applications. The scalability of this framework is the result of its impactful feature designs and command-line interface.
 
Read More About: Angular 12 Brought Several New Features To The Table
 

Final words

You need to learn a bit about the two to decide what to use for your web app project. Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to include more info in this write-up. However, it will tell you about what to choose depending on a few considerations. The polymer should be your choice if you’re going to build an e-commerce application, news platform, websites, and taxi hiring or sharing applications. For a customized app with exclusive requirements, Angular is the better choice. You should also stick with it if you wish to leverage HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, build an app with personalized features and multiple events, create an app with shareable components, or a messaging platform like WhatsApp.