Using polymer as a JS frontend framework wasted about a year of work at my friend's company. They eventually switched to react for one project and an in-house react replacement for the other.

I've used Polymer in three production applications and they were successes.

google is pretty bad at frontend frameworks from my experience :D Polymer is an experiment that should have stayed in that state.

I'd argue that google is pretty strong when it comes to frameworks, and that most of their criticism comes from people who aren't looking for a framework, but rather a library (like React).

And Polymer isn't even really either of those things, it's a polyfill for a native browser feature.

Polymer is not a polyfill for web components - it is higher level library - something like "jquery for web components" - WC polyfill is separate project, in separate repo - you will need it with X-Tags, Svelte, SkateJS too.

No, a polyfill has to closely mirror an API. Polymer is inspired by web components but went its own way for several features.

I'm guessing you're hating on Angular? Why? I'm a huge fan of 1.x & polymer, but I'm curious to know why you think it is not worth using.

True, what I really love about polymer is https://webcomponents.org, basically a collection of webcomponents that can be used either individually or in combination without much setup.

This creates great looking results pretty fast and also enables you to easily give back to the community by open-sourcing your own components. Last time I checked already 1100 components were listed, of which the vast majority seemed really well build.

That's not correct, the Web Component catalog is completely separate from Polymer. Polymer is a library to make it easier to implement web components. You can use Polymer without using any of the community's components.

What did he say that wasn't correct? He said he loves polymer because it gets him access to community made web components.. Made in Polymer...

He implied that https://webcomponents.org/ is part of Polymer, but it is not.

The downside of polymer is that it doesn't really play nicely with modern toolchains.

Yeah because with Polymer you don't even need a toolchain.

I hate toolchains and their clunky 10+ seconds compile step.

Expect good news on this front at the Polymer Summit on Tuesday.

Why not Angular?

It's conspicuously missing from these discussions

From someone who works with Angular everyday, on a multitude of projects... Angular feels far too heavy in comparison to React. While Angular can do the job, there's just too much bloat.

Super powerful but it's no longer the shinny new penny of front end frameworks. Devs like shinny stuff.