From the course: Learning Polymer

So what is Polymer? - Polymer Tutorial

From the course: Learning Polymer

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So what is Polymer?

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- [Instructor] Now that we have a fundamental understanding of what web components are, let's turn our attention to seeing how Polymer fits into all this. First, Polymer is not a framework. And this is an important point to understand. Polymer doesn't require that you build your app a certain way. And it's not an all-or-nothing decision you need to make, like with other frameworks. It is an open-source library that makes working with web components easier. Building and using web components requires a certain amount of repetitive boilerplate code, that Polymer helps to abstract away from your project, so that you can focus on your core application logic. Polymer also provides a set of polyfills for browsers that don't yet support all of the web components standards natively. So even if a browser doesn't have some web components features built in yet, you can still use them. Polymer also provides a set of data-binding features that make it easier to control how data flows within your components and within your application. If you were going to build your web application normally, you would just build it to work directly with the web components APIs, in order to get all their benefits. So you'd have your web application, and then you'd have all the W3C standards sitting underneath it. Polymer sits between your application and the web components APIs. It provides a layer of abstraction that makes the web standards a bit easier to use. In this way, you can sort of think of it the same way that jQuery makes working with the DOM APIs easier.

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