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{% include alpha.html %}

{{site.project_title}} is a new type of library for the web, built on top of Web Components, and designed to leverage the evolving web platform on modern browsers. {: .lead }

Download Polymer v{{site.latest_version}}

<iframe id="video" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=PLRAVCSU_HVYu-zlRaqArF8Ytwz1jlMOIM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Quick start

  1. Download the .zip of polymer-all from the link above. If you want to use Git, see Getting the code.

  2. Fire up a web server in your app's directory.

  3. Include polymer.min.js (bundled with the release) in your main page:

     <script src="polymer.min.js"></script>

  4. Read the Getting Started guide.

  5. Learn how to soup-up your web components using the Polymer core.

  6. Play with the polymer-elements, polymer-ui-elements, and toolkit-ui (also must be run from a web server).

  7. Join the mailing list! Ask questions and give feedback.

What is {{site.project_title}}?

{: style="clear:both" }

{{site.project_title}} is comprised of two efforts:

  • A set of core platform features (Shadow DOM, Custom Elements, MDV). Initially, these core features will be enabled with a set of polyfills. As browsers begin to implement these new primitives, the polyfill platform layer becomes smaller and better over time.
  • A next-generation web application framework built upon these core technologies called the {{site.project_title}}.

The architectural stack looks like this:

<iframe src="/images/architecture-diagram.svg?{{'now' | date: "%Y%m%d"}}"></iframe> Architectural Diagram

Guiding principles

The overall aim of {{site.project_title}} is to manage the complexity of building web applications. Our principles are:

Everything is a component — Encapsulation is the key to creating scalable, maintainable applications. All {{site.project_title}} resources are components, even ones that are non-visual. To construct an app, a developer creates new components, or uses ones {{site.project_title}} provides, and assembles them together. Focusing on individual, composable building blocks allows developers to "think locally" about their application, reducing complexity. With this divide-and-conquer approach, applications can simultaneously be simple and arbitrarily complicated.

Extreme pragmatism — Developers should write the minimum amount of code possible to create their application. Anything repetitive should be re-factored into a component, handled by {{site.project_title}} itself, or added into the browser platform itself. {{site.project_title}} provides simple syntax without reducing features, and avoids boilerplate wherever possible.

Salt to taste — Use as much or as little of the framework as you wish. An application can choose to only load polymer-all/platform/platform.js to take advantage of the polyfills, or add polymer-all/polymer/polymer.js to provide extra batteries for web components. We call these types of elements "{{site.project_title}} elements".