Polymer Dart as a SPA framework

4
votes

I know that polymer is primarily used to create reusable elements, and angular is supposed to be used to create web apps (at least from a "high level" perspective), but I wonder, since you can wrap your own "Screens" as polymer elements, which actually could serve as controllers too, and switch the active page with the iron-pages element (see SPA demo), and you can also use more-routing well... instead of "routing by code", it supports one/two way binding and events, I've actually done some small SPA app like that myself, and so far so good actually! moving on-

Assuming I don't care about having some built-in REST wrapper such as the one provided by Angular (Easy to roll up my own if I use Dart), then in Dart's case:

  1. Could polymer actually be used to create full apps?
  2. Would it have any implications in performance if my whole app is in polymer? by that I mean, every screen is really an element, and so on.
  3. Development speed, maintainability, and experience? (considering the fact that I use Dart which helps a lot in these areas)
  4. Overall, is it a good idea? I'd like to know your opinions.
  5. Any companies/indie devs have done this before? not necessarily with Dart, but with TypeScript/JS as well, although I'm 100% set on Dart.
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angularjsdartpolymerdart-polymerangular

1 Answers

3
votes

I think Polymer is quite a good fit for that. I wouldn't necessarily go for "a Polymer element per page" but that might depend on the kind of application you are going to build. Especially in Dart Polymer it's a good start to make the root Element a Polymer element. You can for example keep the navigation and switch only a part of the view instead of the entire page (but that might be what you had in mind anyway)

You can also use dependency injection, which is a strong point of Angular.

The dirty checking might be better in Angular 2 but Angular isn't released yet and Polymer also has plans to improve here.