#AskPolymer: Rob answers all the questions ever -- Polycasts #27

Key Takeaways

Hey there, Polycasters. Rob here. I just wanted to welcome you to this brand new segment we're doing on our show called Ask Polymer. Every other week, we're going to do this. We're going to have you send in questions on a social network of your choosing. You got some sort of crazy earworm. Something you want to know about Polymer, but you're not quite sure about, you send those in, you hashtag it, ask Polymer, and we will answer it. All right. Question number one comes from Kenneth who writes in and asks, "Didn't you mention that there would be a CDN for Polymer or something like that? Is that going to be rolling out anytime soon?" Now, in the past, we've uh we've actually encouraged people not to use CDNs with HTML imports because they would have a hard time dduplicating their dependencies. If they're all coming from different domains, the dduping mechanism can't really figure out, you know, where there are uh copies of things. But at the recent Polymer Summit, we showed off a new project we've been working on called Polygit. Adi Osmani did an entire talk where he included Polygit as one of the segments in there showing how you could use it in your projects. The idea with Polygit is that it's actually kind of our own magic server. It uses the GitHub, the raw GitHub API as kind of a CDN-like thing. So, it's great for experimenting. Not quite ready for production though. You don't want to be taking Polygit and using it in a real project. But if you're doing something like a like a JS bin or a little sample, you just want to show something off or prototype, it's perfect for that. And we hope kind of in the long term that Polygate will eventually be production ready. So that could be our CDN solution down the line. So thank you Kenneth for sending that question in. All right, our next question comes from Andrew who asks, "When will Polymer and Angular play nice together?" So great question Andrew. This is actually something you know a lot of people ask. They want to know about Polymer and Angular or Polymer and React or, you know, some other framework. The main reason why many of those frameworks have a hard time working with Polymer today is that pretty much all of them predate web components and so they're not quite sure how to work with things like ShadowDOM. Now, once we have ShadowDOM shipping natively everywhere, the story actually gets a little bit better because it hides and it sort of encapsulates a lot of the things that the web components are doing behind the scenes so the frameworks don't need to know about it. But right now, we're still in this little in between place. we've got polyfills for shadowdom and that can trip up some of these frameworks. So when we get native shadowdom everywhere things will be a lot better also with something like you know specifically for Angular in Angular 2 they've been rewriting their data binding system so it'll work better with the sort of events that polymer elements fire and they'll also be able to handle shadowdom better. They've got a whole sort of shadowdom renderer that they're working on. So thank you Andrew really great question. All right our next question comes from Rory who asks what is your favorite custom element. All right this is a pretty good question. Thank you, Rory, for sending that in. Uh, my favorite custom element is either iron local storage or iron Ajax, which we just did an episode on. So, you can actually go back and watch the previous episode of Polycast, learn all about how to use that element. And the reason why I like both of these is because they're nice declarative data providers. So, I can just sort of wire them up in my application and then persist some data or fetch some data and I don't have to write like any JavaScript to do that, which I don't know, it just makes it a lot easier for me to build apps. So thank you Rory. Really great question. Our next question comes from Andre who asks why did polymer choose to use Bower as its package manager and you know what about something like npm? Are there plans to switch to that in the future? So great question Andre. The reason why we originally went with Bower is because it gives you this nice flat dependency structure when it installs everything and that's really important for HTML imports. Inpends to nest things and that can kind of confuse the system. Now in npm3 they've done a lot of work to improve on this dduplication mechanism. So now you can get flat directories in npm 3 but the one thing that you can't do is conflict resolution and that's actually really important for us. We want to make sure that people aren't installing or you know getting the wrong version of something and getting some weird errors. So in a future version of npm it sounds like they're going to fix that and at that point we'll probably switch over to using that as our package manager. So thank you Andre really great question. All right, our last question comes from David, who asks, "Mosilla has recently said that they're not going to implement HTML imports, instead preferring ES6 modules." So, what are your thoughts about that? So, great question, David. Uh, we actually talked about this a little bit at the Polymer Summit, so you check that out over here. And basically, the long and short of it is Mozilla has said that they're not implementing them yet. They didn't say that they're never going to implement them. And we've been doing a lot of work on the loader spec recently, which is what under the hood both modules and imports depend upon. And what we'd like to maybe see in the future is perhaps both systems using the same mechanism under the hood. And then you could have modules as the imperative flavor. You could have imports as the declarative flavor and developers could benefit from both. So that is the long-term plan. We're going to continue working with Mozilla on that to see where we get. So again, uh, thank you David. Really great question. Okay. Thank you all who sent in those questions. A lot of really great stuff. Uh we didn't get to everything, but we're going to try to get to them in our future episodes. So, be sure to click that little subscribe button down there so you can get notifications as those roll out. If you yourself have questions, you can leave them down in the comments or ping us on a social network of your choosing at # askpolymer. As always, thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time. Hola Polycast.