2010: PHP, CSS, Vanilla JS, and a LAMP Server.

Ah, the simple life.

2016: Node.js, React, Vue, Angular, AngularJS, Polymer, Sass, Less, Gulp, Bower, Grunt.

I can't handle this, I'm shifting domains to Machine Learning.

2017: Numpy, Scipy, TensorFlow, Theano, Keras, Torch, CNNs, RNNs, GANs and LOTS AND LOTS OF MATH!

Okay, okay. Calm down there fella.
JavaScript doesn't seem that complicated now, does it? 🙈

The project where I realized I wanted to go from chemist to pro dev.

I built a flow-chemistry spectrometer with monitoring backend in Haskell.

Spectroscopy is where you add a reagent to a glass tube, it changes color, and by measuring the exact color it tells you how much of something (for example, a toxin) is present in the sample.

I had to do that a lot on factory samples, writing down measurements using pen & paper.

I'm lazy so I decided to do the logical thing: Automate it. I bought a second hand spectrometer, stripped the casing, did a shitload of glassblowing and hooked up tubes to the production pipelines, so I could get samples, mixing them in the correct ratio with reagents in continuous flows using valves.

I ended up using 2 home-crafted arduino-like boards (etching PCBs is fun!).

One to calibrate the mixture against known samples and control solenoid valves to continuously cycle through various reagents and deionized flushing water, the other to record the measurements and send them to a server running a Haskell/Yesod API.

The server collected the information into InfluxDB (A time series database), displaying all data on a graphite dashboard.

Eventually I wrote Haskell plugins for most of the chemistry processes, from pH & temperature measurements to polymer property and pigment tests (they made a lot of printer ink).

Then I was fired because they didn't need chemists anymore, and the code "could be maintained by the intern" (poor guy)...

But I did find out that I loved functional programming, chemistry automation projects, and crafting my own electronics during that time.

Hey Google!
Rename Polymer please.
I'm fed up with all the plastic in my search results...

About to post my first question on SO.

Wish me luck.

How should I word a question without getting downvoted into Oblivion.

(Fucking polymer)

Static HTML pages are better than "web apps".

Static HTML pages are more lightweight and destroy "web apps" in performance, and also have superior compatibility. I see pretty much no benefit in a "web app" over a static HTML page. "Web apps" appear like an overhyped trend that is empty inside.

During my web browsing experience, static HTML pages have consistently loaded faster and more reliably, since the browser is immediately served with content useful for consumption, whereas on JavaScript-based web "apps", the useful content comes in **last**, after the browser has worked its way through a pile of script.

For example, an average-sized Wikipedia article (30 KB wikitext) appears on screen in roughly two seconds, since MediaWiki uses static HTML. Everipedia, in comparison, is a ReactJS app. Guess how long that one needs. Upwards of three times as long!

Making a page JavaScript-based also makes it fragile. If an exception occurs in the JavaScript, the user might end up with a blank page or an endless splash screen, whereas static HTML-based pages still show useful content.

The legacy (2014-2020) HTML-based Twitter.com loaded a user profile in under four seconds. The new react-based web app not only takes twice as long, but sometimes fails to load at all, showing the error "Oops something went wrong! But don't fret – it's not your fault." to be displayed. This could not happen on a static HTML page.

The new JavaScript-based "polymer" YouTube front end that is default since August 2017 also loads slower. While the earlier HTML-based one was already playing the video, the new one has just reached its oh-so-fancy skeleton screen.

It would once have been unthinkable to have a website that does not work at all without JavaScript, but now, pretty much all popular social media sites are JavaScript-dependent. The last time one could view Twitter without JavaScript and tweet from devices with non-sophisticated browsers like Nintendo 3DS was December 2020, when they got rid of the lightweight "M2" mobile website.

Sometimes, web developers break a site in older browser versions by using a JavaScript feature that they do not support, or using a dependency (like Plyr.js) that breaks the site. Static HTML is immune against this failure.

Static HTML pages also let users maximize speed and battery life by deactivating JavaScript. This obviously will disable more sophisticated site features, but the core part, the text, is ready for consumption.

Not to mention, single-page sites and fancy animations can be implemented with JavaScript on top of static HTML, as GitHub.com and the 2018 Reddit redesign do, and Twitter's 2014-2020 desktop front end did.

From the beginning, JavaScript was intended as a tool to complement, not to replace HTML and CSS. It appears to me that the sole "benefit" of having a "web app" is that it appears slightly more "modern" and distinguished from classic web sites due to use of splash screens and lack of the browser's loading animation when navigating, while having oh-so-fancy loading animations and skeleton screens inside the website. Sorry, I prefer seeing content quickly over the app-like appearance of fancy loading screens.

Arguably, another supposed benefit of "web apps" is that there is no blank page when navigating between pages, but in pretty much all major browsers of the last five years, the last page observably remains on screen until the next navigated page is rendered sufficiently for viewing. This is also known as "paint holding".

On any site, whenever I am greeted with content, I feel pleased. Whenever I am greeted with a loading animation, splash screen, or skeleton screen, be it ever so fancy (e.g. fading in an out, moving gradient waves), I think "do they really believe they make me like their site more due to their fancy loading screens?! I am not here for the loading screens!".

To make a page dependent on JavaScript and sacrifice lots of performance for a slight visual benefit does not seem worthed it.

Quote:

> "Yeah, but I'm building a webapp, not a website" - I hear this a lot and it isn't an excuse. I challenge you to define the difference between a webapp and a website that isn't just a vague list of best practices that "apps" are for some reason allowed to disregard. Jeremy Keith makes this point brilliantly.
>
> For example, is Wikipedia an app? What about when I edit an article? What about when I search for an article?
>
> Whether you label your web page as a "site", "app", "microsite", whatever, it doesn't make it exempt from accessibility, performance, browser support and so on.
>
> If you need to excuse yourself from progressive enhancement, you need a better excuse.

– Jake Archibald, 2013

After trying polymer for a week, I can officially say that it is the most confusing framework ever.

They need to learn how to properly document their code.

Stack overflow doesn't help because the dipshit who asked the question ALWAYS "misspelled" a variable.

It's not just the fucking money, it's my fucking time. U wanted Polymer but now React?!! Fuck me sideways!

For school I have to make an attandance tracking application for a school with a group of students. First of all we HAVE to use polymer for our webapp which is absolutely absurd. It is driving us all mad that all this functionality is so complicated and that default js functions are rewritten just to work with polymer and it is just a pile of shit.

Then secondly only half the team is motivated (or at least till today) and really tries to write some fucking code and the other half is just does not fucking turn up, leave urly and wordt of all: they just look at there screens and sit there like shitis just gone get done.

I am so fucking tired of unmotivated people

Hate the urge to rewrite, when a new major version of your JS library is out....

Especially when you're at the last laps of your project...

Been interested in trying Polymer for a while so gave it a try today, two hours later now and about to dropkick my laptop!

Followed the "this-looks-super-easy-guide" but that kinda turned into shit when it was time to run gulp!

How the f#*k can it be so hard to find information and get this to work!

Guess I'll just stick with my Android development and forget about this side project because it affects my mood in a bad f#*king way👹

Polymer Project be like:
"fuck firefox"

Hey guys! Finally decided to jump on board! This is my first rant so go easy.

Working on a project were some freedom of choice is allowed and thinking about using polymer to create a wordpress theme... Is this a good idea or a terrible one?
😕

Html imports. Polyfil. Hey. Reading, this is awesome. <link rel=“import” href=“control.html”> what could be simpler? Deprecated front end. But only need it for developing. Will combine the files at the end.

Estimate converting php to pure html, couple of days.

Go to use it with polyfill (webcompnents.js htmlimport). Doesn’t work.

Try the light components. Doesn’t work.

Try server-side polymer. Doesn’t work.

So much documentation about it working. Then finally come across shadow dom and how html imports are associated with them.

Hell no they aren’t. They are completely different things. Oh. Google packaged them together? No one could agree on shadow dom, and its now going away? Taking the pure html way of combining files into one page with it???

Spent an entire freaking day. But got 8 lines of code and <link rel=“fetch” ...> to do the same thing.

Why hasn’t this been an html standard for say...years. Why can’t the server do a handshake with the client and serve one page (php-ish) if the feature isn’t supported. Otherwise multiple files asyc. I mean. This is a fundamental part of pwa’s.

Why are these obviously smart people so stupid??? Deploy you shitty shadow dom without this obviously useful feature...

When angular 2 came out I started working with it on a project and it took some work to migrate from razor to a SPA.
I had a buddy say "You should take all that time and effort and invest it into learning native app languages. This Angular thing is another passing fad". Lol
He eventually started learning it and I was suggesting he'd implement Polymer with his app so if he needed to use the same component in another project, it would be easier since Polymer has a small dependency cost, and offers framework agnostic implementation.
He then told me, "Polymer is not gonna gain any ground because google is behind Angular more so than Polymer." Lol
Anyway, happy Tuesday, y'all.
Oh yeah, he also said that typescript would never stick. :)

Getting started with Polymer. Does anyone have any tips on the best tools/ways to get started? 😊

Angular? React? Vue? Polymer? ..?
What do you like the most and why?

Wanna start a new project and can't decide, as always

Sooo after returning from my 3 weeks of vacation (student part-timer so no real obligations) I learned that the last two months of work refactoring our legacy app to conform to modern Android app standards, is being shut down because we begin to rewrite everything for cross platform...
Not sure how I feel about it, because I really liked Android development and I poured my heart in it... On the bright side: I'll get to learn more Javascript, HTML, css and polymer stuff which I guess is good.

It still stings a little 😥

What do people think of Vue.js over something like Polymer for making Progressive Web Apps?

I've used Polymer a lot (Angular 1 before that) and I'm not a fan of it's data binding. It is using a web standard though, so should have more components available than any library that makes it's own component system (like Vue.js).

I still don't like using React/Polymer for really big projects. There's nothing like carefully tailored jquery code doing exactly what you wanted with addition of promises and requirejs. Anyone?

!rant

Anybody here working with GE's Predix?

I am nowhere near a webdev and I don't grasp how anything of the web app works. Routing, Polymer, CL, everything's so complicated and has documentation that only tells you 10%

I'm in a react/vue/angular/polymer-debate. Lets continue this here, but only with the worst arguments you heard about these 4.

I start:
React: "I dont like it, facebook might have a backdoor in the code so they can see what we're developing"
Angular: "We use Google Cloud, angular is developed by google too. There is a synergy between the two"

(If you really need this to be a question, then it's "what are the worst arguments you heard about javascript-frameworks?")

I want and need to know much more in computer science, I'm a web developer (polymer, angular, react, js, PHP, CSS, and so more), Java developer too, but I want more, what and where can I learn, read?

Fucking jQuery in Polymer 0.5.

When polymer 0.5 was released, things seemed incredibly easy at first, but when you need to do some complex things, the abstraction layer provided by web components are not of much help. Babel wasn't there too, so I ended up using scope hacks to access event listeners (var self = this). Worse, I have to use jQuery because many of things are downright tedious or fucked up back then, including myself.

Now, React is here; No jQuery, no hacks, no web component polyfills, no unsolvable perf bugs, no scope hacks, no 10sec loading time, no regrets.

If modern computers have more memory but websites demand more memory, doesn't that defeat the benefit?

For example, let's assume YouTube's HTML-based user interface from 2014 needed 100 MB of RAM per tab. Now, computers might have 4 times the RAM on average, but YouTube's polymer JS-based user interface (UI) might need 400 MB per tab, a proportional increase. In fact, the browser needs to walk through a heavy 10 MB pile of JavaScript before being able to show anything on modern YouTube.

It seems like the higher demands nullify the performance benefit from the increased specifications of modern hardware. Computers get stronger but demands and workloads rise too, so performance isn't improved because some website operators feel the need to show off their "fancy" JavaScript.

Attending the Polymer Summit 😀

Hello anyone with any materials to read and understand polymer 3 javascript library and tutorials apart from the docs

!Rant
New to the whole front end world so pardon me for such a question.

I have a huge set of data about 5-10k records flowing in which needs to be displayed in a tabular form with sorting, filtering, selection addition and deletion.

Is it wise to sort and filter in the front end? Or make multiple calls to backend and perform the operations there?

If in front end what is the best way to perform these operations?

The application is going to be loaded on a screen and left there for users to view. So even local storage could be am option.

Using polymer for frontend so any special tool for this in polymer?

The geeks on the Polymer team developed this game so you can meet people at this year's summit

wow! this polymer tool kit is awesome!!

!Rant

I'm diving in the world of polymer. Does someone here have experience with polymer and would you recommend it? And how do you use it?